University of Virginia Library

The Mountain Road.

SHAKSPEARE (Hamlet).

WEBSTER.

I CAN not write the story with my own hands, but
I shall dictate it to a tried and trusty friend, for I
must have the public know all that I can tell respecting
that strange and mysterious death. My name is
Henry Wilde, and I was present when it happened.
It was a week ago, and in body I have been utterly
helpless since that day. I do not think that my intellect
was much disordered by the shock; and yet I
seem to have lost, in some degree, control over my
mind—the power of condensation. Therefore I must
tell this story in my own way. If I am prolix—if I
linger too much over detail not connected with the
act itself, it must be pardoned me.

I am not a young man. I have known Steven
Cranston for more than forty years—ever since he
and I went to school together in our pinafores. I am
forty-eight now. Last week I should have said that
he was two years younger; but he stands to-day where
they do not reckon ages by earthly measurement.
Many who will read these words know what he was
as a man—stern, dark-browed, silent, and mysterious.
He was all this even as a boy.

At the district school we attended together he
seemed to like no one. He might have been a favorite
if he would, for he had the most physical courage

I ever knew any boy to possess. He literally feared
nothing. He had no equal in the various athletic
games with which we whiled away our noonings; and
these two traits, of daring and agility, are potent to
win the suffrages of boys. Any one else possessing
them to such extent would have become a loved
and recognized leader; but Steven Cranston was too
silent, too forbidding and unsocial. No one would
have dared in any wise to interfere with him; but he
had none of those dear boy-friendships, those brotherhoods
of the soul, whose memory, in after years, has
power to thrill so many old men's hearts, and make
them happy boys again.

I said he seemed to like no one. I should have
made one exception. Nearly opposite to him, on the
“girls' side” of the long red school-house, sat Lucia
Reynolds, the daughter of one of our wealthiest men.
She did not owe her popularity to this circumstance,
however. Looking back through the mists of twenty-eight
years, I can see Lucia Reynolds as she was at
fifteen, and I know that I never saw a fairer face. I
met her the other day—a woman of forty-three she is
now, and older than her years, with a look of patient
waiting in her eyes, a settled sorrow round her lips—
a woman to whom you would not even pay that saddest
compliment, “She must have been beautiful
once;” and I turned my eyes away, and back through
the fair country of the past, till I could see her, as I
saw her twenty-eight years ago, bending over her desk
in Ryefield school-house.

Slight, girlish figure; small but perfect features;
eyes of the bluest; delicate rose-tint on the dimpled
cheeks; full, smiling mouth—I saw them all in the

light and glory of youth, untouched by time. She
had a clear, ringing voice, a dancing step, and, better
than all, a heart full of love for every living creature;
and so every body loved her, and every body included
misanthropic Steven Cranston. Indeed, his sentiment
for her seemed no mere childish liking. It was more
the blind devotion of a Romanist for his patron saint.
He would sit and watch her for hours with a look of
rapt adoration. Lucia had the heart of a woman, and
she could not help recognizing and liking this homage.
She accepted, with the graciousness of a gentle queen,
the rare flowers and fruit he used constantly to seek
for her, and she befriended him in her turn. She was
his warm defender when any one censured his coldness
and misanthropy, and more than one predicted
he would some day win her for his wife.

I never thought so, however. I was five years
older than Lucia, and I think I understood her. I felt
certain that he must be very different from Cranston
who would arouse her heart from its long, delicious,
dreaming girlhood, and quicken it into womanhood's
passionate yet steadfast love. And yet I used sometimes
to fancy that he loved her with a man's passion
even then. If she could have returned it how different
might have been the current of his future! Does
it not seem as if there were some lives to which Destiny
is pitiless? lips from which the only cup in all
the spheres which could work their healing is dashed
remorselessly?

When Lucia Reynolds was sixteen I left the place,
and for many years I went back there but seldom. I
kept up, however, a constant correspondence with my
sister Bell, and through her was made au courant in
all the gossip of Ryefield.

Two years after I left a stranger came to live there
—a Colonel Eastman, whose family consisted of an invalid
wife and a son, a young man who had nearly finished
his collegiate course. When this latter personage
came home for his first long summer vacation after
the establishment of the family, Bell's letters were
quite full of him—he was so handsome, so gallant, so
generous and gentlemanly. Soon she wrote that he
had made the acquaintance of Lucia Reynolds. She believed
that it was nearly a case of love at first sight on
both sides. She wrote me that they were always together;
that they seemed just suited to each other; and
Lucia was growing prettier than ever in her happiness.
To one of these descriptions she added, playfully,

“I suppose I'm too bad to break your heart, brother
Harry! I remember your old admiration for Lucia;
but I seriously hope you won't look as glum as
Steve Cranston did when Robert Eastman first came.
You would have thought he'd lost his last friend; but
he seems to have gotten bravely over it now, and is
more cheerful and good-humored than I've ever seen
him before. Indeed, I don't know but I shall lay siege
to his heart myself.”

I don't remember that I thought much of what Bell
said of Steven's glum looks, but I did smile at her
allusion to breaking my heart. I could afford to
laugh at such things in those days. I loved—no matter;
I am not telling my own story. There is a little
white stone in Weymouth church-yard, and it is the
sole memorial of the only dream I ever dreamed of love
and woman. Yet I have not lived a sad or gloomy
life. After death comes heaven, and I shall find my
virgin bride there.

It was early autumn when I received a letter from
Bell, full of tragic gloom—of sorrow—of desolation.
Young Robert Eastman, whom every body liked, had
been found dead in the Mountain Road, near the Black
Pool—murdered, evidently. No blood had been spilled,
but the marks around his throat showed that he
had been strangled. He was robbed also, and had
doubtless been killed for the sake of a considerable
sum of money which he had drawn from the bank the
day before, and was carrying home to his father. As
yet, she said, suspicion was directed to no one; but it
was so sad—so terrible—just as he had become engaged
to Lucia! It would break her heart; and his
poor sick mother had not spoken since.

I was too happy in those days for the story of this
tragedy to sadden me as deeply as it might have done
at another time; still I felt it keenly for the sake of
Lucia, my dear friend and schoolmate.

From time to time Bell wrote me of the apprehension
of several persons faintly suspected of the dreadful
crime, but no evidence could be brought against
any of them, and they were all discharged. It was
not long before I heard that the poor young man's
mother had followed him to his long home in Ryefield
church-yard; and, soon after, Colonel Eastman, unable
to live on and bear his sorrow in the scene of his double
bereavement, sold out and moved away.

It was not till three years after, when my own life's
trouble had already come to me, that I saw Lucia Reynolds
again. She seemed nearly as old then as she
does now. Her mouth was rigid; the look of patient
waiting had grown into her far-seeing blue eyes. She
never laughed, and she spoke low and seldom.

At the same time I saw Steven Cranston. Over
him too had passed some inexplicable change. More
glum, forbidding, and unsocial than of old he could
scarcely be, and yet there was something in his face, in
his manner, which seemed to say that, whereas Hope
and he knew each other once, they had parted company
forever now.

I did not see much of him or Lucia after that until
this summer. I came to my old home last June an
invalid. I felt that the free winds blowing over the
Connecticut hills would bring me health and healing;
and, though my dearest hope is in the Beyond, still I
love life—I cherish no misanthropic longing for death.
Coming back to Ryefield, I found Lucia Reynolds and
Steven Cranston the only ones of all my schoolmates
who were unmarried and in their old homes. You
must bear in mind that nearly twenty-five years had
gone by since young Eastman's sudden and terrible
death. Lucia had passed all these very quietly. She
had not mingled at all in society so called, but her face
was known in the abodes of the poor, the sick, and the
sorrowful. She had done much good in her own unobtrusive
way.

Steven Cranston had led, rumor said, a wild life
during these twenty-five years. A little more than
three years after Robert Eastman's death he had gone
to sea, and most of his life since had been passed on the
ocean and in the different ports to which he had sailed.
He had grown rich, though I heard hints of  unlawful 
gain, to which I did not pay much heed. Country
neighborhoods are usually more or less given to
gossip, and ours was no exception to the rule.

At all events, he had come back the autumn before

my return to Ryefield, and given out that he had been
to sea long enough, and was going to settle down now
and end his days among his own townsfolk and kindred.
I think people liked him somewhat better than
they used. He was a trifle more communicative and
neighborly. I can't say that I, however, felt much
real regard for him. Yet he entertained me sometimes
by his reminiscences of hair-breadth escapes on the
high seas and in far-away lands. He was a link between
memory and the dead and buried boyhood days,
and so we were a good deal together.

It is just a week ago to-day that he rode into the
yard on his strong bay horse. I was sitting under the
apple-tree.

“Come, Harry,” he called to me, “get your horse
saddled, and ride out on the Mountain Road. I've a
story to tell you, madder, and joller, and merrier than
any of 'em. It's a nice time to tell it, this September
morning. Let me see, September the 17th, 1858, isn't
it? Yes, it's the best time in the world to tell that
story.”

It struck me that his manner was very peculiar.
It was said that he was a hard drinker, though I had
never seen any signs of it before. I thought the
brandy might have flown to his head. However, I
got ready, and we started on our ride.

If any, unfamiliar with the locality, should read this
story, perhaps they would like to understand better
the physiognomy of the Mountain Road. In the
northwestern part of the town is a very high hill,
known in that region as “The Mountain.” A road
was laid out, in the town's infancy, along the base of
this hill. It was the nearest cut then to some of the

neighboring towns, but a better one was made a few
years ago on the other side of the hill. In some portions
of the way it is as utterly solitary as a wilderness.
To the right hand rises the mountain, overhanging
it, high, and steep, and frowning. To the left
stretch away rugged pasture lots, used only for sheep,
rocky, and here and there interspersed with wood.
On this road there is little travel, and for nearly two
miles there is not a single house save one, ruinous and
dilapidated enough now, but which used to be, in my
boyish days, the residence of a solitary man called old
Wrath Spaulding—a bad and reckless man, in whose
very name lurked terror. He died long ago, and I
have never heard but that he sleeps quietly enough in
his lonely grave in the rear of his old tumble-down
house. A little beyond this place — the half-way
house in those desolate two miles—and just concealed
from it by a turn in the road, is a deep pool at the
base of the hill, known to all the townspeople as the
“Black Pool.” It looks as if it might have been dug
out by the giants of dead centuries. Its waters seem
fathomless in depth, and one can not gaze down on
them as they lie there, black, still, treacherous, without
a shudder. It used in other days to be separated from
the road by a sort of paling, but this has fallen down
now, and the way is so seldom traveled that no one
has taken the trouble to replace it. There is a strange
charm in the ruggedness of the scenery, the very desolation
of this untrodden road, and I looked around me
with a keen sense of pleasure as we slackened our
reins and turned into it.

Though it was September, the landscape was still
as fresh and verdurous as in July. You could understand

the poetical license of the term “living green”
as you looked at it. You could almost see the trees
grow and the grass spring up. The sky was blue,
deep, cloudless, untroubled. The mist—golden, and
white, and rosy—was melting away over the hill-tops,
and, it seemed to me, earth, air, and sky were as glorious
as when the Father first pronounced them “good.”
Absorbed in my own thoughts, I had almost forgotten
Cranston's presence until he spoke.

“I promised you a story,” he said, riding up close
to my side. “It'll be a queer one—a love story about
murder,” and he grinned a ghastly grin. “I don't
think you ever heard just such a one—a tale with its
hero for the teller.”

He paused a moment, and the September morning
seemed to grow very cold; I think his manner chilled
me. Pretty soon he spoke again.

“I don't know as you ever mistrusted that I loved
Lucia Reynolds. There was a time, I think, when
people imagined that we took a kind of fancy to one
another, but nothing came of it, and they gave up the
idea. Perhaps there was never any foundation for it
on her side. She must have returned such devotion
as mine was with at least a kindly liking. I think
she did like me, and on that I built wild hopes. Love
does not at all express what I felt for her. I worshiped
her. Sullen, and morose, and gloomy as every
body thought me, one smile of hers would make a
light bright as heaven in my heart. I would have
died, I used to think, for the sole hope that she would
weep over my grave. I have kissed, when no one
saw me, the very grass that had bent under her light
footsteps. I have treasured, like something sacred, a

flower that had dropped out of her pretty hair. It
was nothing short of madness; but if she could have
loved me back again I might have been a good man.
With her for my guardian angel, I believe I could
have won through and scaled heaven. Well, now, I
suppose, I shall go to company that's more of my kind
than saints and angels.

“I went to see her one day when she wasn't quite
eighteen, and told her what she had been to me all my
life, ever since the days when she used to sit opposite
to me in school, a little eight years old child, in her
red dresses and white aprons. I tried to show her the
height, and breadth, and depth of my love. I think I
made her understand it, as well as her gentle nature
could understand the strong passion of mine. She
heard me all through, and then she began to cry. I
have heard of women weeping at such times for joy
and bashfulness, but I knew well enough her tears
were not of that kind. They fell fast. They were
born of her tender pity—her sorrow at giving me pain
—and they answered me as well as words.

“Soon she commanded herself and spoke. She
talked like an angel. She told me how much she had
always thought of me, and always should. She would
be my sister, she said—a fond, loving sister; but such
love as I asked for she could not give me.

“I wept then too. It was the last time any tears
ever fell from my eyes; but I bowed my head on her
lap—I was kneeling at her feet—and the flood broke
loose.

“Even after that I did not quite give up all hope.
Time, I thought, might work wonders. Any way, she
had been the life of my life too long for me to shut

her out of my heart. I went on worshiping her, and
I comforted myself—it was the only comfort I had—
with thinking that even if she did not love me she
loved no other. It was just before then that Colonel
Eastman had moved to Ryefield, and very soon his
son Robert came home to pass the summer. He met
Lucia, and they seemed at once greatly interested in
one another. It was not strange. He was of her kind
—generous, genial, and loving. I suppose they were
just suited to each other. Well, I hated him. That
was not strange, either. I hated his handsome face,
his social manners. I gave to every one of his good
qualities a distinct and separate hate; and, because her
eyes looked on him with favor, this still, deadly hate
grew daily deadlier and more murderous. But I dissembled.
I even cultivated his friendship. I was
more social and good-humored than I had ever been
before, and I began to gain popularity. But the
smiles I wore were like flowers growing over a volcano.

“After a while I heard that he and Lucia were engaged,
and then I resolved that he should die. I met
him just as usual, with this purpose in my heart. I
even congratulated him on his happiness. But I
watched his every movement — close, close. Soon
there came a time which placed him in my power.
He was to come from Windham one day with five
hundred dollars he had drawn from the bank the day
before. He would come this way. I resolved to
meet him here. He was not expected until afternoon,
but I came early in the morning: I was determined
he should not escape me. I stationed myself behind
that clump of poplars, near the Black Pool. Lightning

has blasted them since. No wonder. I had not
been there very long before I heard a horse's footsteps.
I looked out cautiously. It was he. He had started
early—perhaps to make the journey in the coolness
of morning; perhaps—I gnashed my teeth in silent
fury at the thought—perhaps he was in haste to see
again his fair betrothed.

“I had laid my plans as coolly as I tell them to
you now. I had armed myself, and resolved, as soon
as he should reach me, to spring from my concealment,
fell him from his horse, and murder him then
and there. Of course there was always the chance
that he should defend himself and master me—the yet
more dreadful chance that, if I killed him, I should
expiate my crime upon the gallows; but, physically,
I am no coward. I had made up my mind, and there
was no fear that I should flinch.

“It happened better than I had planned. For once
Satan favored his own. Before he reached me he dismounted
and tied his horse to the fence on the other
side of the way. The animal looked tired, and, I suppose,
his master was in the mood to be merciful. Then
he came across the road, and sat down in the very
shadow of the poplars behind which I, his deadly enemy,
was hid. He took off his cap and bared his
forehead to the September morning air. Then he
drew from his pocket a miniature, and bent over it
lovingly. I was almost near enough to hear him
breathe. I could see the features as well as he. Lucia
was there—Lucia, with her soft hair, her eyes of
violet blue, her bewildering smile. After a moment
he pressed it passionately to his lips, murmuring, fondly,

“`Oh, Lucia, my bride, my darling, my dear, dear
love!'

“If I had meant to spare his life before, I should
have killed him then. I might never win her, but he
should not live to bask in her smiles—to claim her—
to hold her in his arms.

“Softly as a cat I stole from my concealment. Absorbed
in his happy thoughts, he neither saw nor heard
me until I stood behind him, and my hands were
clasped around his throat — tight, tight. Then, indeed,
he struggled for his life. But I never relaxed
my hold. Soon he fell down at my feet—still and
stiff, struggling no longer—dead.

“I was calm still. I rifled his pockets. I took the
five hundred dollars and his watch, and tied them, together
with a heavy stone, in his pocket-handkerchief,
and dropped them into the Black Pool. They cleft
the dark waters and sank heavily. In an instant they
were lost to sight forever. I left the miniature—
which I longed but did not dare to keep—upon his
person. I gave him, as he lay there, one long, triumphant
gaze, and then quietly walked away home.

“But not even yet was my hatred satisfied. The
dead man lying there, stark and cold, with his face
upturned to the September sun, was yet, to my thinking,
better off than I. Gladly, ay, gladly would I
have taken his place, and lain there dead, but to have
once heard her lips call me the beloved of her soul—
to have carried the memory of her kisses into the
hereafter of spirits.

“For a time I half expected to suffer for my crime
a felon's doom; but suspicion never seemed to point
my way. That afternoon his horse, which I had left

as he had tied it, broke from its fastening, and rushed,
riderless, home. Then they found his body. The
robbery which had been committed seemed to indicate
the money he had with him as the motive of the deed,
and led to the apprehension of two or three persons
hitherto suspected of theft. But they were all discharged;
and after Mrs. Eastman had died, and the
colonel moved away, the matter pretty much ceased
to be talked of.

“The first pang of remorse I suffered was when I
saw Lucia standing at Mrs. Eastman's grave. I had
not seen her before since that day. She had changed in
those few weeks so that you would hardly have known
her. Her cheek and lips were ashen; the smiles had
faded forever from her face; the joyous light from her
eyes. I loved her so that I would have died, even
then, to bring back to her happiness; but I would
have seen her die before, if the power had been mine,
I would have restored her lover to life.

“Three years after that I went to see her. In all
this time I had never once seen her alone. Now I
could wait no longer. I had not much hope, yet I
longed to tell her again of my love. She came into
the room where I waited for her, and stood before me.
A mortal terror seized upon me, and seemed to chill
the blood in my veins. I read in her cold eyes that
she knew my secret.

“`Listen to me, Steven Cranston,' she said, in her
low yet distinct voice. `You have come here to ask
my love. Hear what I have to say, and consider
whether I am likely to give it. I loved Robert Eastman
better than my own life. Every hope I had for
all the future centred in him. I saw heaven itself

through his eyes. If lightning had struck him, if sudden
fever had drunk up his life, or slow disease wasted
it, I would have been faithful to his memory forever.
How much more now? You—you, who professed to
love me and care for my happiness, you murdered him.
You took away all the hope I had in the world. I
know this from my own sure instinct—the instinct
which makes every pulse quiver with loathing at the
sight of your face or the sound of your voice. But I
could not have proved it against you. Even if I could
I would not. I had rather you should live, that, perchance,
in some eleventh hour, even your soul may
find mercy of God. Besides, the time will come when
worse than any mere physical death will be the torture
of your spirit. He will be avenged by the remorse
which shall dog your footsteps like a fiend.'

“As she said these words her cold gray eyes flashed
fire upon me, as you have sometimes seen the lightning
flash from the cold gray depths of a winter's cloud. I
did not answer her a word—contrite confession, bold
denial, were alike impossible. I slunk out of the house
like a coward. I have never entered it since.

“Soon after that I went to sea, and I have followed
it for more than twenty years. Oh! could I ever tell
you what I have suffered? Nights, when I would
look into the waters and see, plain as I see it now, this
Mountain Road, always with Robert Eastman lying
dead and ghastly under the poplars—noons, when the
winds going by me would shriek with frantic, accusing
voices in my ears, and I would wonder that those
around me did not hear that pursuing cry, and hang
me in their midst as a murderer. Sometimes, where
the figure-head of the vessel should have been, I seemed

to see Lucia stand—that same withering fire in her
cold eyes, and her thin hand pointing down, ever down,
to the depths below, and the tortures that waited for
me there. Do you wonder I fled from such visions?
I came here for rest and quiet, but he pursues me still.

“I have told you my story because I could not die
with my crime unconfessed, and I am too tired of life
to keep my secret any longer. Now you may go and
deliver me up to the Philistines.”

He stopped. His voice had risen, in the latter part
of his confession, to a fierce shriek. A glare as of
madness was in his eyes. It seemed to me that it
would be but a short step from this excitement to utter
phrensy. I strove to soothe him.

“No,” I said, “I will not betray you. Heaven is
infinite, and there may be mercy yet, even for you.
She spared you, and so will I. Cry to God, and He
may yet hear you.”

A wild gleam shot across his face.

“No,” he cried, “God's mercy I ask not for—man's
mercy I will not have. My hour of doom has come.
Fiends wait for me. Twenty-and-five years ago this
seventeenth of September Robert Eastman died by my
hand. To-day—to-day his unquiet ghost shall be
avenged!”

Our horses had been standing still for half an hour
under the trees; but, as the last words fell from his
lips, he struck the one he rode a sharp, quick blow,
and dashed away from me. Breathless with terror, I
hurried after him. I was only in time to see him
throw himself from his horse and plunge into the
Black Pool. I sprang to the ground and rushed to the
chasm's brink. As I looked in I had one momentary

glimpse of a white, ghastly face, on which sat the
impress of everlasting despair; I heard one cry, “Lost
—lost—lost!” and the waters closed over him forever.

I hurried to the proper authorities and told my story.
No one dreamed of questioning it. Then I
came home and threw myself on this bed, from which
I may not soon arise. There are few who could bear
such a scene unmoved; and to me, with my nerves
already weakened and disordered by illness, it had
well-nigh proved fatal. It will be long before I shall
cease to see that despairing face—to hear that last cry
of mortal agony; but calmness will come back to me
in time—if not in this life, in the land where there is
no work and no device—where the yew and the willow
wave forever over the great city of the silent.