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.
At breakfast, the next morning after the departure of the Illinoisan, asomewhat strange character was called to the attention of the guests at theCrawford; and a few of them, sitting near him, entered into conversationwith him when they discovered the peculiar habits of life and mind whichhad for years made him an object of interest to visitors among themountains. He had been absent southward of the range, in Pinkham Notch, atGlen Ellis Falls and other wild localities lying north of Conway, for thepreceding two or three weeks, only arriving the night before; and very fewof the persons then present at the Crawford had seen him except inhalf-forgotten meetings in previous years. He called himself and was calledby others who knew him (very few of whom, probably, knew him by any othername) "The Rambler," and his habits of life were said to justify theappellation most completely, as his appearance certainly accorded with thepreconceived opinions of an itinerant hermit.
He was a man evidently past fifty, with a face much wrinkled by time androughened by exposure--with a high forehead bald nearly to the apex of thehead, long grizzled hair, rapidly approaching to white, tumbled about incareless profusion, beard straggling and ungraceful and graying as fast asthe hair, and something melancholy and unsettled in the eye which indicatedthat his wandering habits might have had an origin, many years before, insome loss or misfortune that made quiet a torture. In figure he was ratherbelow than above the middle height, with a certain wiriness in the limbsand a hard look in the bones and tendons of the hand, suggestive of unusualactivity and an iron grip.
But when they came to know more of him from the explanations of theservants and a little listening to his own conversation, those who on thatoccasion first met him had reason to confess that the Rambler needed allthe iron nerve and hard endurance indicated by his physique. They believedhim to be a man of means, and he certainly spent money with freedom if notwith lavishness, the supply seeming to be as slight and yet asinexhaustible as that of the widow's cruse. He spent very little of it uponhis own person, however: such a suit of coarse gray woollen as he wore thatmorning, with a slouched hat and strong brogan shoes, usually completinghis outer equipment. Sometimes he carried a heavy cane, but much oftenerwent armed with a stout staff of his own length, cut with ready hawks-billjack-knife from a convenient oaken or hickory sapling and trimmed from itssuperabundance of knots by the same easily-managed substitute for a whole"kit" of carpenters'-tools.
This man, as it appeared, had never missed coming to the mountains for asingle summer of the preceding fifteen years. Whence he came, no one knew;and whither he went when his season was over (_his_ season had very littleto do with the fashionable one, in commencement or duration), was knownquite as little. He might be looked for, they said, at the Profile, theCrawford, the Glen, the Alpine, the White Mountain or down in PinkhamNotch, at any time after they began to paint up and repair the houses forthe reception of visitors, in early June; and he might be expected to makehis appearance at any or all of those places, any day or no day, during thefall season and even up to the time when the last coach-load rolled away inSeptember and the first snows began to sprinkle themselves on the brows ofWashington and Lafayette. He never remained at any one of the houses morethan a few hours at a time, carrying away from each a few sandwiches, alittle dried tongue, some cheese and crackers in a small haversack, andsleeping nine nights out of ten in the open air, with no pillow but a stoneor a log of wood, and his slouched hat. Most of the time he was alone onthe tops of the most difficult peaks or at the bottom of gorges where nofoot but his own would be likely to tread; or he was to be seen dodgingacross a path, staff in hand and haversack on side, as a party was makingsome one of the ascents,--rather shunning any company then seeking it, andyet evidently neither misanthropic nor embarrassed when thrown into societyand forced into conversation. Wherever he wished to go he went on foot,even when thirty or forty miles of rough mountain roads and paths were tobe measured; and no man, they averred, had ever seen him set foot over theside of a vehicle or recognize the right of the animal man to be drawnabout from place to place by his brother animal the horse.
So far the Rambler, according to the accounts given of him, was merely aharmless monomaniac--harmless even to himself, as all monomaniacs are_not_. But beyond that point, the servants and some of the old habituesaverred, came positive madness. He had been mad, since the first day of hiscoming to the mountains and perhaps long before, on the idea of _climbing_.Many had seen him go up to those peaks and down into those ravines beforementioned, and found as little disposition as ability to follow him. Heseemed to climb without purpose, except his purpose might be the merereckless exposure of himself to danger at which every one except himselfwould draw back with a shudder. And that he did this without any motiveoutside of himself for the action--that he had no thought of awakeningadmiration by such exhibitions,--was evident from the fact that he was justas likely to make some ascent or descent of the most recklessfool-hardiness, when he did not know of the presence of any other personwithin possible sight, as when he had groups of horrified spectators; andthat loneliness was not a condition precedent to such an attempt, was justas evident from the fact that he never seemed to desist because one personor fifty came suddenly upon him and "caught him in the act." He seemed tolive in a climbing world of his own, in which he was the only resident andall the others merely chance visitors who might or might not be in the waywhen he found it necessary to hang himself like a fly on the crags betweenheaven and earth.
We are making no attempt whatever at analyzing the mentality of thissingular man, whom many will remember as having met him during some periodof the last dozen years, at one or more of the Notches of the WhiteMountains. As well might the attempt be made to survey one of his ownmountain tops or discover the superfices of one of the mighty masses ofperpendicular rock that so often afforded him a footing at which thechamois would have given up in despair and Hervio Nano (that human "fly onthe ceiling") writhed his boneless limbs in a shudder! We are only roughlydaguerreotyping the man as he appeared, preparatory to one terribleincident which made him an important character in this narration. Were anyeffort to be made at explaining his strange and apparently purposelesspredilection, perhaps one word would come as near to furnishing theexplanation as five hundred others--_excitement_. One man drinks liquorsuntil he goes beyond himself; another invites to his brain the temptingdemons of opium, hasheesh or nicotine; another perils his prosperity andthe very bread of his family at play; still another plunges into pleasureso deeply that the draught is all the while maddening agony; and yetanother claps spur on heel and takes sword in hand and rides into the thickof the deadliest fight, without one motive of patriotism or one thought ofduty: and all these are seeking that which will temporarily lift them aboveand beyond themselves (alas!--that which will just as assuredly plunge them_below_ themselves, in reaction!)--excitement. Who knows that the poorRambler, bankrupt in heart, hope and memory, had not tasted all the othermaddening bowls and found them too weak to wean him from his hour ofsuffering, so that when the frequent paroxysm came he had no alternativebut to place himself in some position where the hand and the foot couldbecome masters of every thought and feeling, that the rude minstrelsy ofdeadly danger might thus charm away the black moment from his soul!
All this is mere speculation--the man may have been nothing more nor lessthan a maniac; and yet his conversation, which was coherent and marked byentire propriety, did not create any such impression.
No one who has made any study of the scenery of our Northern Mountainsfails to know that many of them (and almost all the White Mountains thathave full descent on either side to either of the Notches) in addition tothe bald scarred brows of cliff that on one side or anoth
er seem like faceslifting themselves in stern defiance to the storm,--have chased down them,from brow to foot, channels or "schutes" from which the torrent or thelightning has originally shorn away trees, herbage and at last earth, everyyear wearing them deeper and making more startling the contrast of thealmost direct line of bluish gray cliff, seeming the very mockery of a paththat no man can walk, with the green of the living grass and foliage andthe white skeletons of the dead birches, that border them on either side.Perhaps no feature of the mountain scenery is more certain to awake ashudder, than such "schutes," as looked up to from below or down upon fromabove; as the thought of a passage-way is inevitable, followed by theremembrance of the headlong fall of any man who should attempt a progressso nearly perpendicular, and that followed by the imagination that thegazer has really attempted it and is falling. Mount Webster and MountWillard, at the White Mountain Notch, are more marked than almost any ofthe others, by such features; and certain terrible adventures along those"schutes" make part of the repertoires of guides and the boasting storiesof old habitues. With one of those descending Mount Willard, and thepoints of scenery immediately surrounding it, we shall have painfuloccasion to make more intimate acquaintance in this immediate connection.
These "schutes" and their topography were the subject of conversation atthe breakfast-table that morning, not alone on account of the presence ofthe Rambler, which might have provoked it, but from the fact that a pic-nicon the top of Mount Willard, in the near vicinity of one of those temptinghorrors, had been for some days in contemplation and the wagons were beingprepared for going up and the cold food packing away in baskets and hampersat the very moment of that discussion.
"You must know the mountains remarkably well," one of the gentlemen at thetable was saying to the Rambler.
"I ought to do so," was the reply. "There is scarcely a spot from Littletonto Winnipiseogee that my foot has not touched; and I may almost say thatthere is not a spot where I have not eaten or slept." He said this in amanner as far removed from any desire to make a display of himself as fromany thing like modesty--merely as the fact, and therefore a matter ofcourse.
"I heard you speaking of climbing the schutes a moment ago, but I did notquite catch what you said," spoke another. "You certainly cannot hold on tothe rocks alone, when they are so nearly perpendicular, can you?"
"Oh, no," answered the Rambler, "of course that would be impossible. Isuppose I have a sure foot and a steady hand, and those schutes always havetrees and shrubbery beside them, all the way down. It is no trouble to holdon to _them_--at least it is not so to _me_."
"Ugh!" said yet another--"rather you than me! Such exposures are terrible!"and he shuddered at the picture his imagination had been drawing.
"They may be terrible, and I suppose that they are so, to some people," wasthe quiet reply. "Habit is every thing, no doubt. Some of you might walkinto battle, if you have been there before, a good deal more coolly than Icould do, even though you had a good deal more to sacrifice in life thanmyself in the event of a bullet going astray."
"Bullets never go astray, nor do men fall down the rocks accidentally!" putin a breakfaster who wore a white neckcloth but no mock-sanctimoniousvisage. "I am afraid, brothers, that you all forget the Overruling Handwhich guides all things and prevents what thoughtless people call'accidents.'"
"Ah!" said Horace Townsend. "Domine, do you carry fatalism, orpredestination, if you like the word any better,--so far as to believe thatevery step of a man is supernaturally protected?"
"It is supernaturally _ordered_, beyond a doubt: it may be _protected_, orquite the opposite," was the minister's smiling reply. "And I might go astep further and say that every man is supernaturally _upheld_, when doinga great duty, however dangerous, so that that result may follow, whether itcome in life or death, in success or failure--which may be eventually bestfor _him_ as well as best for the interests of heaven and earth, all menand all time."
"A sublime thought, and one that may be worth calling to mind a good manytimes in life!" was all the reply that the lawyer made, and he took nofurther part in the conversation. He sat back in his chair, the momentafter; and Margaret Hayley (who had now become to some extent his"observer," as he had erewhile filled the same office to Halstead Rowan andClara Vanderlyn)--Margaret Hayley, sitting at a considerable distance upthe table on the opposite side, saw that his face seemed strangely moved,and that there was intense thought in the eye that looked straight forwardand yet apparently gazed on vacancy.
Meanwhile the Rambler had not yet ceased to be an object of interest; and alittle warning (such as he had undoubtedly heard a good many times duringhis strange life) was to follow the inquiries and the speculations.
"Then you probably do not think, Domine," said one of the interlocutors inresponse to the remark which seemed to have struck Horace Townsend soforcibly, "that our friend here is under any especial supernaturalprotection when climbing up and down places where he has no errand whateverexcept his own amusement."
"I might think so, if I had the power to decide that he was reallyattempting no good whatever to himself or others," was the reply. "But as Icannot so decide, though I certainly think such exposures of life veryimprudent, I shall be very careful not to express any such opinion."
"Well, sir, I certainly wish you no harm," said another, "but if allaccounts are true, I think that you expose yourself very recklessly, and Iexpect, some day, to hear that the pitcher you have carried once too oftento the well is broken at last."
"Perhaps so," said the Rambler, without one indication on his features thathe was either frightened or moved by the suggestions. "I am long past themiddle of life--my limbs are not quite so nimble as they once were--and ifI do make a miss-step some time and get killed, I hope that they will allowme to lie peaceably where I fall!"
After which strange wish the conversation went no further. Breakfast wasjust breaking up; and a few moments afterwards some who were standing onthe piazza saw the Rambler stepping away down the road, haversack of bread,cheese, and meats strapped under his left arm, and his weather-beatenslouched hat thrown forward to shield his eyes from the morning sun thatcame streaming low and broad up the Notch.
It was perhaps an hour afterwards when two wagons drew up at the door,ready to bear some score of the visitors up Mount Willard for the expectedpic-nic. A third wagon had started ahead, bearing provisions enough to havesupplied a small army--all to be wasted or made into perquisites for theservants by a frolic dictated a little by ennui and not a little by a lovefor any thing novel or merry. Two or three of the young men staying at thehouse had been up Mount Willard a few days before, and on their return theyhad brought such flattering accounts of a magnificent broad, green plateauwhich they had discovered (how many times it had before been discovered isnot stated) not far from the end of the carriage-road, on the southern browof the mountain and overlooking the cascades and the edge of the Devil'sDen,--that the effect produced on the as yet untravelled people at theCrawford by the announcement was very much the same that we may suppose tohave been manifested at the Court of Castile and Leon when Columbus cameback with the Indians, the birds'-feathers and the big stories. The youngmen had signalized their own faith in the desirableness of the land as aplace of permanent occupation, by possessing themselves of a small coil ofinch rope, lying unused in one of the out-houses since the re-erection ofthe Crawford (after the fire of the winter before), in 1859, carting it ina wagon up the mountain and to the tempting plateau, and there using oneend of it and a seat-board to make such a stupendous swing between two hightrees that stood on one side of the green space, as had probably never beenseen before in any locality where the clouds every morning tangledthemselves among the branches. One of them had declared that he had the"highest old swing," in that "scup," ever taken by mortal, and a good manybelieved him. The swing, with its hundred feet or more of super-abundantrope, had remained as a permanence; a few of the ladies at the house hadbeen coaxed into going up Mount Willard especially to ind
ulge in that"scupping" which ordinarily belonged to low lands and lazierwatering-places; and for two or three days before preparations andarrangements for a pic-nic had been in progress, destined to culminate onthat splendid cloudless morning of early August.
So much premised, nothing more need be said than that all the few personsconnected with this relation and yet remaining at the Crawford, weremembers of the pic-nic party of twenty or twenty-five, a pleasant minglingof both sexes but not of all the ages; that Captain Hector Coles andMargaret Hayley went up especially in each other's company, as was bothusual and proper; that Mrs. Burton Hayley, getting ready to go on to theGlen and a little absorbed in one of the ministerial brethren whom she hadfound, did not ascend a mountain on any such vain and frivolous errand as amere pic-nic; that Horace Townsend rode up, in a different wagon from thatoccupied by Margaret and her cavalier, and with no one in charge, or evenin especial company--precisely as he had gone up Mount Washington; that theparty, in both wagons, was very merry and tuned to the highest possiblepitch of enjoyment; that the usual jolts incidental to very bad mountainroads were periodically encountered, and the little screams and jerkings atprotecting coats, ordinarily consequent thereupon, were evoked; that a fewmagnificent views down the Notch and among the sea of peaks were enjoyed,with a few contretemps among the riders adding zest thereto; that nearlyevery one would have been willing to make oath that they had been "all butupset down the mountain" several times, when they had not really been evenonce in that threatening predicament; and that after something more than anhour of riding they found themselves and their pic-nic preparations at theend of the carriage-road and very near the diminutive promised land whichthey had been invited and enticed to come up and occupy.
It was indeed, as those who had never before visited the place found uponreaching it through a little clump of trees and bushes beyond thetermination of the road--a spot well worthy the attention of any visitor tothe Notch. Nothing else like it, probably, could have been found in thewhole chain of the White Mountains, following them from the head waters ofthe Androscoggin to the mouth of the Pemigawasset. For the purposes of thisveracious narration it becomes necessary to describe some of the featuresof the spot more closely than they would demand under ordinarycircumstances; and the reader may find it equally necessary to make closeapplication of the details of description, in order fully to appreciatethat which must inevitably follow, beyond the control of either reader orwriter.
At some day, no doubt many a long year before, whether caused by themelting of the snows at the top of the mountain or by some one of thoseinternal convulsions which the earth seems to share with the human atom whoinhabits it,--there had been a heavy "slide" from near the peak on thesouth-south-western side, coming down perhaps a quarter of a mile beforeearth and stone met with any check. Then the check had been sudden andsevere, from some obstruction below, and as a consequence the slide hadgone no farther downward but spread itself into a broad plateau of fifty orsixty feet by one hundred, nearly level though with a slight inclinationdownward towards the edge. There had chanced to be but few rocks at the topof this mass of earth, and the southern exposure and shelter from the northwinds had no doubt tended to warm and fertilize it, so that while much ofthe top of the mountain was bald, scarred and bare, and all the remaindercovered with wild, rough forest--this little plateau had really grown to becovered with grassy sward, of no particular luxuriance but quite a marvelat that bleak height. Behind it, upward, the mountain rose graduallytowards the peak, seen through a younger growth of trees that had foundtheir origin since the catastrophe which swept away all their predecessors.On both sides the thick tangled woods closed down heavily, leaving no viewin either direction, except through their swaying branches; while in thedirection of the slide itself, no tree intervening between the plateau andits edge, one of the most beautiful perspectives of the whole mountainrange spread itself out to the admiring gaze.
Looking close as possible down the side of Mount Willard, at that point,the trees and undergrowth of the gorge below, some fifteen hundred or twothousand feet away, could be discerned, through that slight blue hazewhich marks distance and faintly suggests the great depth of the sky.Lifting the eye, it swept south-westward and took in a terribly rough rangeof wooded hills and minor mountain peaks, with a broad intervale lyingbetween, through which glittered and flashed the little stream with itswhite cascades which gave name to the spot, hurrying down in foam and furyto join the Saco in the broad valley below. Further westward and at stillgreater distance rose the mountains lying behind Bethlehem, with the top ofLafayette, of the Franconia range, rising yet higher and beyond all,touched with the warm light of the noonday sun and supplying a perfectfinish to what was truly an enchanting picture.
But at the edge of the plateau itself lay that which must command the mostspecial notice in this connection. Whether formed before the slide orconsequent upon it, one of the most precipitous of all the "schutes" of themountains had its start at the very centre. It had worn away the earth ofthe plateau in the middle, until it reduced it nearly to the stone of thefirst formation; while at the side of the narrow trough thus formed, thicktrees and undergrowth clustered as far down as the eye could extend, withone sharp bend outward at the right, and striking out still beyond that,the massive roots of a fallen tree, of which the trunk lay buried in theearth and covered with undergrowth, while one long thorn or fang of theroot hung half way across the chasm and suggested that there of all places,above the dizzy depth beneath, one of those eagles should sit screaming,that are supposed ever to have kept position on some such outpost, shoutinghoarse rage and defiance through far away and desolate Glencoe, ever sincethe massacre of the Macdonalds. Still below this and almost touching thestony bottom of the trough of the schute, another and much smaller fang ofroot extended, the broad bulk of the side-roots forming a close wallbetween the two branches and the hedge of undergrowth, almost as imperviousto the hand of man and as unfavorable for any purpose of clinging, as thesloping stone itself. It was a dizzy thing to look down--that schute, assome of the stronger-sexed, clearer-headed and surer-footed of the pic-nicparty found by venturing near the edge, and as they did not feel itnecessary to reassure themselves by any second examination.
The baskets and hampers had been brought over from the baggage-wagon, atthe same time that the party themselves made their arrival. Why it is thatpeople who go out upon pic-nics, in any part of the country or indeed inany part of the globe, with high expectations of much enjoyment which is tobe found in other modes than the use of the masticative apparatus,--why itis, we say, that all such persons, even though they may have eaten heartilynot two hours before, become ravenously hungry the very moment they reachthe ground designated and are good for nothing thereafter until they haverendered themselves helpless by over-eating,--why all this is, we say oncemore, passes human understanding; but the fact remains not the less patent.Let any frequenter of pic-nics think backward and try whether he or she canremember any instance to the contrary,--and whether the conclusion has notbeen more than once arrived at, in his or her particular mind, that thetrue aim and object of the pic-nic, as an institution, is to enjoy theeating of a bad dinner away from the ordinary table instead of a good oneproperly spread upon it.
The party on Mount Willard was mortal, and they bowed at once to thisunaccountable weakness of mortality. Five minutes of inspecting the groundand viewing the scenery; and then, while the more selfish members of thecompany or those who had eaten heartier breakfasts, flirted, strolled, orindulged in the doubtful pleasures of the swing (which hung between twotall trees at the left of the plateau, with a loose hundred feet of rope atthe root of one), the less selfish or the more hungry applied themselves tospreading out on the dry sward the half dozen of cloths that had beenbrought up from the hotel, and to laying out upon it, in various stagesand phases of damage and disarrangement, eatables which had beenappetizing enough when they left the Crawford, but of which, now, theywould have been seriously puzzled to separa
te the fish from the farina orthe maccaroni from the mustard.
The helpful ladies and their male assistants had just succeeded inproducing that amount of confusion among the articles on the spreadtable-cloths which was supposed to represent arranging the lunch,--and thecall for volunteers to disarrange it more effectually with forks andfingers was about to be made,--when one of the gentlemen looked up suddenlyas a shadow passed him.
"Our friend the Rambler," he said as the other, with a slight nod,recognized his notice and passed on down the plateau towards the thicket atthe north-western edge.
"Why yes," said one of the ladies. "He walked and we rode, and yet he seemsto have been up before us, for he is coming down from the farthest side ofthe mountain."
"Shall I call him and ask him to take a share in our dinner?" asked one ofthe male stewards.
"No, it would be useless: the Rambler, they say, generally chooses his ownsociety, and he probably would not even thank us for the invitation,"answered another. The strange man had by that time passed into the thicketbordering the edge of the schute at the right, and was seen no longer. Someof the pic-nickers noticed, as he passed, that he had no stick in his handsand that his almost invariable companion, the haversack, was missing fromhis side. But there seemed to be no occasion of commenting on so slight amatter, and nothing was said with reference to it.
It must be confessed that among those who had not contributed in any way tothe spreading of the miscellaneous dinner upon the ground, were two personsin whom this narration maintains a peculiar interest--Horace Townsend,lawyer, and Margaret Hayley, gentlewoman. The lady had been among the earlyvisitors to the swing; and at the time of the disappearance of the Ramblerinto the thicket at the edge of the schute, she was being swept backwardand forward in the air by that dizzying contrivance, at a rate which senther loosened wealth of dark hair and her light summer drapery floatingabout in equal negligence and profusion, while the dainty white hands heldfast to the rope with a tenacity which showed them to possess a commendabledegree of nerve, and the trim dark gaiter enclosing her Arab foot, and thespotless stocking that rose above it, had both just that measure of displaywhich preserved the extremest bound of delicacy and yet made the wholespectacle strangely bewitching. Perhaps the extraordinary light in her eyeas she swung may have been a little influenced by one of the two pairs ofhands that supplied the careful impelling force; for those hands certainlybelonged to the lawyer, who had been a member of the idle section from thebeginning, while she had wilfully attached herself to it in spite of theexpostulations of the Captain. That gallant officer, by the way, had beenretained among the dinner-purveyors by the wiles and the threats of alittle dark-eyed minx from Providence, who cared no more for him than shedid for her shoe-lace, but who would flirt with him and make him flirt withher, because she saw that he was arrogant, shoulder-strapped, and very muchafraid of being seen for a moment absent from the side of Margaret Hayley.The Captain, who was not quite fool enough to believe that he had reallymade a military conquest of the young Yankee girl, probably objurgated herin his heart for her charming impudence; while Margaret, more gratified bythe relief than she cared to make manifest, may have made privatecalculations of hugging that dear little tormentor the first moment whenshe could catch her alone.
Such was the aspect of affairs--the young girl in the swing, Townsend andanother gentleman swinging her, half a dozen merry young men and girlsgathered around the trees or lying lazily on the grass, and the other andmore industrious half-score kneeling and bending and squatting around thetable-cloths at U. C. of the plateau,--when the arrangements (ormis-arrangements) were judged to be complete and one of the male members ofthe working-detail, a little hungry and disposed to be more than a littlewitty, made up one hand into the shape of a trumpet and bawled through it:
"Oh yes,--oh yes!--know all men and several women by these presents thatthe regal banquet is spread and that those who intend to eat are requiredto eat now or ever after hold their pieces--if they can find any to hold!"
A merry farce--the very incarnation of thoughtless jollity,--the dinner andthe announcement. It rung out over the plateau, heard by all and certain tobe heeded by all; to be succeeded the very instant after by a sound that nomember of that company will ever forget until his dying day. A scream ofmortal agony and terror that seemed to rise from the depths of the schute,nondescript in some respects, as unlike what any one then present had everheard, but unmistakably human because the last sounds of every repetitionshaped themselves into words that could be distinguished:
"Help!--help!--help!"
For one moment that fearful cry ceased and during that moment all wassilence among the pic-nickers. For that instant, too, probably more thanhalf the company believed that whatever the sound might be, it was theprank of some unscrupulous joker, hidden away in the undergrowth near theedge of the schute and intended to frighten the ladies out of any appetitefor their dinner. The time of its coming, immediately following thedinner-call, was certainly favorable to that supposition. But when itcommenced again, the very instant after, louder and more shrill, soevidently coming up from the depth below, the thought of practical jestvanished and every cheek grew deadly white with the certainty that sometragedy was being enacted near them, that human eye must be blasted byseeing and that human hand could probably find no power to avert.
It would have seemed the most unlikely of all things, when that ambiguousbanquet on the top of the mountain was spread, that it should never beeaten; and yet the fates had so destined. Old Ancaeus had quite as littlefaith in the prediction of the slave whom he overworked in his vineyard,that he should never taste of the product of the vines; and when he heldthe cup in his hand and the red wine was bubbling to the brim, ready toshow the audacious prophet the fallacy of his prediction, the muttered:"There's many a slip between the cup and the lip!" no doubt fell uponincredulous ears. But even then the cry rang out that called him to theHunt of the Calydonian Boar, and the spirit of the warrior was higher thanthe pride of the wine-grower and the hard master. The heavy cup wentclanging to the earth, the blood of the grape flowing out to enrich oncemore the ground from which it had been derived; and the tyrant hero rushedaway. The slaves had a new master, thereafter; and though Ancaeus may havesupped with the gods on Olympus, on the night when the great fight wasover, he never tasted of that wine of his vineyard which had once even beenlifted to his lips! So tasted not the diners on that mountain in a fardistant land from that which held Olympus, even when the feast was spreadand the call had been made for their gathering.
It is impossible to say what point of time elapsed before any member ofthat horrified company remembered the Rambler, his habits, the conversationof that morning, and the fact that he had only a few moments before beenseen going in the direction from which that piteous cry was coming up. Itis impossible to measure it, for at such moments ages of sensation pass inthe very twinkling of an eye. Some of them did remember him, with a groan,and perhaps the thought was general. At all events the consternation wasso--as general as if some one who had come away from the Crawford with themin life and high hope, had suddenly been stricken dead before their eyes.Margaret Hayley, with the frightened cry which even then shaped a feeling:"Oh, Mr. Townsend, what _can_ that be!" dropped from the swing and wascaught in arms outstretched to receive her. By that time all seated aroundthe table-cloths had sprung to their feet; and at once every member of theparty, male and female, impelled by a curiosity that even overmasteredfear, rushed down the plateau towards the edge, as if some horrible madnesshad seized all and they were about to spring off into the great chasmbelow. But before they had reached the edge all the ladies except two andseveral of the gentlemen recoiled; and it was only by degrees and under thecompelling attraction of that still ascending cry, that some of thoseremaining could force themselves to the verge. Those who reached it at thatmoment, and those who closed up the instant after, saw enough to makeBlondin and his brother-fools a non-necessity for the balance of theirnatural lives; and t
he cry from below was answered, be sure, by a cry thatrang from every voice above when the sad spectacle met the eye.
It was indeed the subject of their past fear who supplied their presenthorror; and the situation, keeping in view previous descriptions of thelocality, may be briefly conveyed.
It will be remembered that at the bend or elbow of the gulch, some thirtyfeet below, two fangs of the root of a tree stretched out partially acrossthe chasm, the upper long and at some distance from the rock of the bottom,the other shorter and lying very near it. It will also be remembered thatbeneath both the schute stretched its long blue jagged line to the foot ofthe mountain, not less than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, with theair between the top and bottom looking actually blue from distance,--andthat the schute itself was so nearly perpendicular that while any objectfalling down it would probably touch it all the way from top to bottom, itwould go down almost with the velocity of the lightning and be rolled andpounded to a mere ball before it had accomplished half of the descent.
On that lower fang of the root hung the Rambler--those who had seen him atthe Crawford recognized him at once, at that short distance; and it wasindeed from that throat so little accustomed to call for assistance fromany mortal hand, that the terrible cries of agony and appeals for help wereascending. One hand grasped the root near the end, without being able to gonearly round it, and one leg was caught round the root farther towards thetree, with the bend at the knee forming a kind of hook so long as it couldretain its tension. The other arm and leg hung down, with the body, below,and the long grizzled hair streamed away from the head that dependeddownward in the direction towards which it seemed to be so fatally tending.The face could be seen, as that was turned towards the cliff, but itsexpression could not be recognized at that distance and in the reversedposition that it occupied. All that could be known, to any certainty, wasthat there hung a human being, evidently unable even to recover a saferhold upon the root, screaming for help that was hopeless, and as certain tomake the last plunge within a space of time that could be measured bysingle minutes, or perhaps even by seconds, as the sun was certain to moveon in its course and the earth to retain its laws of gravitation!
Was there not cause, indeed, for that general cry of pitying horror fromabove, which answered the cry of agony and terror from below?
The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863 Page 21