CHAPTER XXVI

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TOM LESLIE AT NIAGARA--A DASH AT SCENERY THERE--A RENCONTRE--DEXTER RALSTON ONCE MORE--UNION MAN OR REBEL?--TOM LESLIE DISCOUNTED.

It will be remembered that Tom Leslie, leaving Josephine Harris with a sigh of regret at Utica (those jolly fellows do sigh sometimes, after all!) went on to Niagara on the afternoon of the Fifth of July. Walter Lane Harding had promised to join him at the Cataract, early in the following week, if he could so arrange his business as to leave the city on Sunday or Monday; but just now Leslie was alone--worse alone than he ever remembered to have been at any former period of his life. Lost one night in a pass of the Apennines, with some doubts whether he should ever be able to find his way to supper and civilization, he had been lonely enough for comfort; and pacing his solitary night round as a sentinel under the frowning guns of Sebastopol, he had felt that another friendly human face would be pleasant to see and a friendly human voice something not be despised; but neither of those situations could for a moment compare with the loneliness of that summer afternoon and evening, while he was bowling along through the Genesee Valley.

The absence of the whole world is a grief, when we do not wish to be alone, but that is a grief in the _general_. The coming of any one person will break the spell and fill the void. But the absence of the _one_, immediately after earth and air have seemed to be full of the sacred presence, is grief in the _particular_. Only one can fill that void, and the coming of that one is for the time impossible. The company of thousands of others is then an aggravation and an insult, making the loneliness worse by contrast with the apparent companionship of all others.

Tom Leslie (this fact may have been sufficiently indicated before)--Tom Leslie was deeply, irrevocably, hopelessly in love, and he had not even taken the ordinary pains to deceive himself on the subject. He had found his destiny and submitted to it, after a long period of immunity. He had every reason to know that his regard was returned; and he had no reason to doubt, though not an explicit word had been spoken to warrant the belief--that when he asked the corresponding question of Josephine Harris, as he certainly meant to do at a very early day, her answer would be a frank and satisfactory--yes! So much for content and the future. But Tom, like many another child, had no propensity for waiting, and liked his sugar-plums _now_ as well as to-morrow. He would have liked to give up business, ignore propriety, and have the company of the odd combination of female graces and weaknesses who had won him, all the while for the present, and afterwards by way of variety. So he felt at that moment, at least; and it was with more than one, or two, or a dozen yawns and "Heighos!" and several short naps that happened along on his travel like cities of refuge, that he managed to wear through the last hours of his journey.

But Tom Leslie, the cosmopolitan and journalist, would have been unworthy the experience through which he had passed, had he lacked the power to endure what he disliked. He could never have digested horse-beef among the Kalmucks, or stomached the rancid sour-krout of Old Haarlem, without this indispensable qualification. So, though on the night of his arrival at the Cataract he allowed the thunder of the fall to call him in vain to a view by the broken moonlight, and though he tumbled into bed within ten minutes after his late and light supper and went sullenly to sleep as if there had not been a woman in the world worth thinking of,--yet he was in quite another mood the next morning.

Niagara was unusually full for so early a period in the season, the leading houses being already crowded, though principally by transient visitors. The Fourth of July, then just passed, had been kept with unusual vigor and display, in the way of powder, fireworks and general patriotism at the International, the Cataract and all the other more popular houses--partially, no doubt, because the evil eyes from across the river began to be noticeable, and because the red-cross flag had been more conspicuously displayed at the Clifton House and on the flag-staff at the Museum at Table Rock, than in ordinary seasons.

But whatever changes might have occurred in personal and national feeling, Tom Leslie felt, as he strolled across the bridge and over Goat Island, on the morning after his arrival, that there had been no change which the human eye could perceive, in the great cataract or its surroundings, since he had looked upon it for the last time before his departure for Europe, when that narrow river supplied the northern boundary of what seemed to be a united and happy nation. Humanity is changing, inconsistent and unreliable: Nature is calm, grand, and verges on the eternal. He saw that the great American Rapid still came thundering down, "like a herd of white buffaloes with wild eyes and sea-green manes," as a graphic writer has described it; that the grand old trees with their gloomy immensity of shade and the thousands of unknown and long-forgotten names carved upon their bark, still stood as sentinels along the beaten pathways over the Island; that the thunder of the Fall still kept the whole solid mass of the Island in one creeping and trembling shudder, as if a slight earthquake was just passing, with a dull, heavy boom like that of a continuous distant cannonade, coming up in the pauses of the wind.

He saw, too, as he paid his inevitable quarter at the toll-house on the causeway, that the course of "honest industry" (_i.e._, that blatant humbug which eternally taxes the pockets for superfluities) had not been checked; for the usual amount of birchen-canoes, bead-caps and feather-fans with sprawled birds in the centre, were on sale under peculiarly aboriginal auspices. And that the whole race of Jehus had not relieved society by going to be killed-off in the war, he became painfully aware by the number of villainous-looking wretches armed with dilapidated whips, who beset him on the bridge and offered to convey him anywhere for something less than the mere pleasure of his company. Tom Leslie had been somewhat too familiar in other lands as well as his own, with such human vermin as those with the whips, and such fungi temptations to extravagance as those that hung from the tawny hands and beckoned from shelves and glass cases,--to pay them much attention or receive much annoyance from them; and so he passed on across the Island, to look once more upon the great English Fall and the Canada shore beyond.

Emerging from the woods upon the high bank overlooking the English rapids, the whole unequalled scene burst once more on his view, as he had patriotically tried to remember it when looking at Terni and Schaffhausen. He had carried the sight and almost the roar with him, in memory, ready to dwarf with them all that the European world could present; and so sacred seemed the thought of that wonder of nature which could form such a talisman, that the broad hat was insensibly lifted from his brow as he caught the first new glimpse, and he stood before the Fall fairly uncovered as he might have done on the crest of the Judean hills, overlooking the first-seen Jerusalem.

The dark and rugged Canadian shore was full in view on the other side of the river, with the Clifton House and the Museum glimmering brightly in the morning sunlight, and the red-cross flag waving sluggishly from both as if in defiance of the great nation that lay so near and yet could not possess the little patch of land over which it floated. The Horse-Shoe Tower stood as of old, still unconquered by the fierce rapids striving to undermine it; and around base and balcony swarmed visitors who seemed like pigmies not so much on account of the distance as because they were dwarfed and belittled in the presence of the immense and the immeasurable. All these things lay broadly in sight of the journalist on that glorious Sunday morning, and perhaps at another time he might have seen and attempted to describe them; but not _then_. He for the moment failed to see what was before him, and he saw something else not revealed to every eye.

Tom Leslie was either the master or the slave of a powerful imagination. Some who knew him said the one, and some the other. But all agreed as to the possession of the faculty; and it was not always that his soberest and most conscientious relations (in type) were received without a shade of suspicion on that account. It may have been that the loneliness of the night before had not quite worn away, and that it left him sadder and more impressible than usual; and it may have been that the one element before wanting in his nature, that of earnest and undivided human love, had changed him when it was supplied. At all events, there was a something in that wondrous scene, that came to him that morning as he had never before known it--something that came to him from dream-land, and made the sight of his eyes only the exercise of a secondary faculty. He saw, with this peculiar sight, all the features of the scene that we have noted, and another and one strikingly unusual, in a shipwreck in the rapids.

Two days before, on the Fourth, and in honor of the day, a knot of gay fellows had procured an old schooner, hoisted white streamers at the tops of her stripped masts, and sent her down the river into the rapids from Chippewa Creek, expecting to enjoy the rare pleasure of seeing her leap over the Falls and emerge in little fragments and splinters of timber in the river below. Thousands had gathered on the Canadian shore, and on Goat Island, to witness a prank never matched in audacity since the British "guerrillas" from the other side, in the time of the Canadian rebellion, seized the steamer "Caroline" at Schlosser, set her on fire, and sent her down the Falls--an act which almost lit the torch of war so effectually between the two countries, that all the waters which overwhelmed the "Caroline" would not have been enough to quench it.

But with reference to the old schooner, sent down from Chippewa Creek on the Fourth of July. She had only shown that human calculations are not infallible, even when they presage disaster. The thousands assembled to witness the destruction, had been doomed to disappointment. The current had swept the boat well over on the Canadian side, and there some unknown eddy had seized and driven her between two sunken rocks, where she lay as safe from any danger of the Falls as if she had been ten miles below them, instead of half a mile above. She lay, bow up the river, inclined lengthwise, as if she had been caught when shooting down the Lachine Rapids, and the white streamers on her bare masts fluttering out to the winds as signals of distress that would have been--ah! so hopeless and useless with human life on board and in peril.

At the first moment of beholding the old wreck, Tom Leslie found her a prominent feature in the spectacle, and his reflections took a shape which may have been taken by those of many sojourners at the Falls, who saw her during the season:

"There she lies to-day, and there she may lie for many a long month, gradually weakening and breaking apart from the action of the rapids surging around her, until some night when the wind comes fiercely down the river, and heavy storms have increased the volume of water as well as loosened the last bolt that yet holds her securely together,--then, when there is none to witness the death-throe of wood and iron, she will heave and labor and at last break apart. The two fragments will go sweeping down, whirled over like playthings--touching the points of the rocks and giving out groans and shrieks like those which precede dissolution; then for one moment there will be a dark mass poised on the edge of the Fall, and the next there will be one more deafening crash added even to the thunder of the waters. A few broken splinters will go sweeping away down the dark river, and all will be over."

But what was it that Tom Leslie saw, more than is revealed to the natural eyes, looking on that scene when he had contemplated it for a few moments? This and only this--but quite enough to make the memory of that moment immortal. He saw it _applied to the human heart and human life_. The water pouring over the Horse-shoe Fall ceased for the moment to be the falling water of this real world, and became some weird stream falling thunderously and in white glory through the land of dreams. The dark misty gulf into which it poured below was not the physical abyss over which the natural man must stand with a shudder, but the unfathomed pit of woe and sorrow into which, in nightmare dreams, man has been ever falling yet never destroyed, since the first visions of early childhood. The tower ceased to be a palpable mass of wood and stone, and became human hope and energy, with the clear blue sky of God's providence above, beaten by storms and undermined by fierce currents every moment threatening it with destruction, but standing yet through all. And the old wrecked schooner above had ceased to be a mere material wreck of plank and timber and iron--it was one of those unreal but sadder wrecks of a human life and a human soul, stranded for the moment on the rock of some great calamity, and eventually to be swept away and engulfed by the inevitable.

There had been a slight veil of haze shrouding the sun for the previous half hour; but as Tom Leslie partially awakened from his dream and listlessly descended the stairs cut in the bank, towards the bridge leading to the Tower, the mist rolled away, the sun broke forth in the glory of high-noon, and out of the darkness below sprang an arch of light that almost made the journalist, who was too old and too world-hardened for such exhibitions, clap his hands and cry: "The rainbow! the rainbow!" Of old he had seen the rainbow spanning the eastern heaven when looking out at early evening from the home of his childhood, and when the thunder-storms of summer were dying away over the Atlantic; but here it was, a thing of arms' reach, and at his feet! At one moment it merely glimmered up through the mist from the bed of the river, a little broken space of the arch, and the colors dim and indistinct; anon the sky grew brighter and the column of mist rose higher; and now it formed more than the half circle, the top a little above the level of the Fall,--and the blue, and gold, and green, and orange, and purple, painted so brightly on the retina of the eye that they seemed to be a part of the very air the observer was inhaling. How near he stood, impressible Tom, at that moment, to the eternal mystery!--how near to the workshop in which seem to be flashed out from eternal forges the beauties of the sunshine and the storm! Climbing down from the bridge to the end of the rock, leaning tremblingly over and looking down into the misty gulf below with that Jacob's Ladder of faith set therein--it is not strange that the journalist for one moment wished for a line and plummet to drop into that reservoir of golden glory and bring up some memento of what seemed so near to the celestial;--just as one wishes, sometimes when the midnight heaven is darkest and the stars are burning most purely there, to be able to stretch forth a hand among the stellar lights and bring it back bathed with that radiance which is so fearfully beautiful.

Leslie had no intention of ascending the tower that day--other days would be his at Niagara, and something must be saved for each. Besides, he had breakfasted lightly and an unromantic call for lunch was being made on faculties quite as delicate as his mental perceptions. He had accordingly just turned again and ascended the stairs to the bank in front of the Pavilion, when the fates (ever kind to him in this regard, as to every other true lover of nature) vouchsafed him one moment's glimpse of a spectacle often wished for and seen but seldom. Turning for one last glimpse as he walked away, at that instant his eye was resting on the sharpest point of the curve of the Horse-shoe Fall, where the volume of water is evidently deepest, and where from that depth it makes one broad unbroken sweep of amber green as it plunges over, without one fleck of foam to mar it. He was just scanning for an instant that calm depth, and saying that _there_ was after all the majesty of Niagara--there, where the great green flood approaches the awful precipice, impelled by a resistless force from above, but unruffled and untroubled by the approaching fate--bends gracefully and proudly at the verge, as some dusky Antoinette might do her proud neck when the axe of the executioner was impending--then, still without a ripple or a tremor takes the last long plunge as Curtius may have done when the gulf was open in the Forum and he rode down the Aventine and spurred out into thin air to fulfil the omens of the augurs and save the perilled life of Rome,--he was just feeling and saying this, when a dark speck appeared at the very edge of the green. It was a log, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet in length, over the Fall!--a mere log, nothing in another place, but everything in the place it for that moment occupied. For one instant he saw it hang trembling on the verge, then for another its dark outlines were thrown into clear relief against the bright green water with the sunshine glimmering through; and then down, down it was hurled, rushing like an arrow's flight into the feathery foam of the broken water below, and at last (so far as human eye could ever know) into the blinding mist at the bottom of the cataract. What a reed upon the brook had been that log, that might have required the strength of a dozen men to lift it from the ground!--what is the might with which the elements make playthings of what seem to mortal strength dense and immoveable--even as the great Power that is equally above nature and above man, "holdeth the mountains in the hollow of his hand, and taketh up the isles as a very little thing!"

"By George!" said Leslie. "What a lucky dog I am! I have known a thousand people who wished for just such a view, and I have had it all alone, after all!" He was not in the habit of holding conversations aloud with himself; but he had been so impressed as to speak aloud involuntarily, in this instance.

"No, not quite alone, if you please, Mr. Leslie!" said a deep voice behind him, and at the same instant a hand was laid upon his shoulder. He turned, and met the powerful form and singular face of Dexter Ralston, the Virginian.

It was not unnatural that Leslie should be surprised; and it would be idle to say that he was not even startled at this most unexpected meeting, remembering what he did of the last three occasions on which he had met this man--in each instance, as he had reason to suppose, his observation being unknown to the other. He might have been pardoned if he even shuddered, remembering the connection which he believed Ralston to bear towards the "red woman"; and he was too ardent a Union man, as we have seen, not instantly to remember the ambiguous circumstances under which he had twice seen him, and the chase after him and his companions which had cost him so long a ride only a few days before. It may be said, in this place, that he had heard nothing from Superintendent Kennedy, before leaving the city, of the watch placed upon the house and its result,--and that after the second adventure of the house on Prince Street, and the opening of the new channel into which his thoughts and feelings had been led by the meeting with Joe Harris, he had not thought proper to follow up the mystery, and consequently had no knowledge that any of the parties had left New York.

All those thoughts, and the counter one that the man before him had really done him no harm but had once rendered him an important service--passed through the mind of Leslie so quickly that the other must have been a close observer to know that they were passing at all. As a result, by the time that they became fairly confronted and Dexter Ralston held out his hand, that of Tom Leslie met him with all apparent frankness.

"Mr. Ralston," he said, owning a part of the truth, "really you surprised me."

"So I suppose," said the other; "and yet I have been standing here, leaning against one of the posts of the Pavilion, for several minutes; and I am certainly not so small of stature as to be easily overlooked."

"No," laughed Leslie. And then he added. "But yonder is something larger. The Falls dwarf everything, and I suppose _hide_ everything."

"Very probably," said Ralston. "Were you walking back towards the bridge? Shall I walk with you? That is--I mean to ask--are you alone?"

"Oh yes, all alone!" said Leslie. "I am at the Cataract. And you--are you staying here?"

"I _have_ been staying at the Clifton," answered the other, as they strolled back across the Island. "But just now I am at the Monteagle. It is long since we met," he added. "You have been in Europe, have you not? I think you told me you were going, when I saw you last."

"Yes," said Leslie, "I have been in Europe again, and only came back last spring." But he added a mental enquiry that was by no means shaped into words: "_Did_ I say to him that I was going to Europe? or does he keep watch of me and know my every movement, through the mysterious agency of the woman of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard?"

"You are a newspaper man still?" asked Ralston, after a momentary silence, as they walked on.

"Yes," said Leslie, "I am still at that drudgery, in my own way, and shall probably never be freed from it. But you see that I do not stick so closely to the desk as to injure my health very much! And you--excuse my asking the question," and he tried, walking at his side though he was, to mark closely whether the question produced any effect on the face of the other--"but the truth is, Ralston, that I scarcely expected to meet you in the North at the present moment. I thought you so incarnate a Southerner, as well as a slaveholder, that you would have been likely to join in the rebellion!"

"No, did you?" asked Ralston; and if his face changed, certainly Leslie, close observer as he thought himself, could not detect the difference. "Well, I must say that you put the matter plainly. You _should_ have thought better of an old friend, and remembered that if I was a _Virginian_ I was also and still more an _American_."

How openly and with what apparent honesty the man spoke! And how impossible it seemed that he _could_ be uttering other words than those of entire truth? But Tom Leslie remembered the night under the arches of the Capitol, the stars-and-bars and the mystic circlet of the house on Prince Street, and the mysterious words that procured admission to the house up-town; and he had seen and heard enough of double faces not to be _too_ sure of his ground on any man's word.

"Well, I am glad to know it," he said, in reply to Ralston's disclaimer. "We have not too many true Union men, who have _forgotten the particular part of the Union in which they were born, for the sake of the country and the whole country_. I am glad to know that you are one of them." He laid peculiar stress on the more important words of the last sentence, and bent his eyes still more searchingly on the countenance of the singular man before him.

"How long do you remain?" asked Ralston, as they neared the end of the bridge.

"A few days only," answered Leslie--"perhaps a week or two. I came up to catch the moon on the Falls."

"You should have come in time, then, and seen the eclipse," said the Virginian.

"Aha!" said Tom Leslie to himself. "One point of information gained, if no more! He is a little in the _habit_ of being at Niagara, for he was here at the full moon in June and he has since been absent! One touch inside your armor, old fellow, if no more! You were here to see the eclipse, then?" he asked aloud of Ralston. "I tried to come myself, but could not manage it. What was it like, if you saw it over the Falls?"

"I was staying at the Clifton House, then," said Ralston, "and I came down to Table Rock, alone, just after midnight, and sat there from the beginning to the end of the obscuration. You should have seen"--and here his undeniable though repressed poetical temperament began to show itself in his cheek and eye--"you should have seen the dull, dismal shadow gradually creeping over the rapids as the disk grew smaller, every flashing wave seeming to be touched with a ghastly reflection that said: 'Daylight and moonlight are both gone forever--the last darkness is creeping on--the end of all things is at hand.' The spray below the cataract seemed dun and lead-colored, as if it might have been the sulphurous smoke rolling up from a battle-field. All was splendidly dismal, let me tell you!--such a spectacle as few men see and no man who sees ever forgets!"

"And what was the appearance of the moon when fully obscured?" asked Leslie, almost breathless with interest at the strangely graphic words of the Virginian, and no longer wondering, after those words, that there should have been a connection between the mysterious "red woman" and one who seemed so nearly of her mental kin.

"It was _no_ moon," answered Ralston, and his dark eyes seemed to lose all their fierceness and grow inexpressibly sad and solemn as he spoke. "It was _no_ moon! It was a mere unreal shadow and mockery--the dead ghost of a moon that had been, perished long ago, and embodying all the griefs and all the sorrows that had weighed down the heart of man since the Creation. The waters of Niagara lay beneath it, as if under a pall that had settled over a dead world!"

"I should have liked to see it--I would have travelled a thousand miles to see it, had I thought so far!" said Leslie, with the earnestness of a lover of Nature under all her aspects.

"Would you?" said Ralston. "Well, it was something to see _once_: I should scarcely like to trust the brain of the man who saw it much oftener. I must leave you, but I hope I shall meet you again. Here boy!" beckoning to one of the lounging hack-drivers at the hotel-end of the bridge, "Drive me to the Monteagle. Good-bye!" and away he whirled, leaving Leslie to look after him until out of sight, and to say to himself as he walked up the esplanade over the rapids:

"I thought that _I_ was an oddity and a contradiction, but that fellow can _discount_ me! I don't know half as much about him now, as I did the first moment I saw him!"

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