In the Valley Part 38

We sat on the mossy bank, on either side of the insensible Philip, and ate the last remaining fragments of our store of food. Another day of this and we should have been forced to shoot something, and light a fire to cook it over, no matter what the danger. Enoch had, indeed, favored this course two days before, but I clung to my notion of keeping Cross's presence in the Valley an absolute secret. His life would have been in deadly peril hereabouts, even before the battle. How bitterly the hatred of him and his traitor-fellows must have been augmented by the slaughter of that cruel ambuscade, I could readily imagine. With what words could I have protected him against the righteous rage of a Snell, for example, or a Seeber, or any one of a hundred others who had left kinsmen behind in that fatal gulch? No! There must be no risk run by meeting any one.

With the scanty meal finished our rest was at an end. We ought to lose no time. Each minute's delay in getting the wounded man under a roof, in bed, within reach of aid and nursing, might be fatal.

It was no light task to get the canoe upon our shoulders, after we had put in it our guns, covered these with ferns and twigs, and upon these laid Philip's bulky form, and a very few moments' progress showed that the work before us was to be no child's play. The conformation of the canoe made it a rather awkward thing to carry, to begin with. To bear it right side up, laden as it was, over eight miles of almost continuous ascent, through a perfectly unbroken wilderness, was as laborious an undertaking as it is easy to conceive.

We toiled along so slowly, and the wretched little brook, whose bed we strove to follow, described such a wandering course, and was so often rendered fairly impa.s.sable by rocks, driftwood, and overhanging thicket, that when the sun hung due south above us we had covered barely half our journey, and confronted still the hardest portion of it. We were so exhausted when this noon hour came, too, that I could make no objection when Enoch declared his purpose of getting some trout from the brook, and cooking them. Besides, we were far enough away from the river highway and from all habitations now to render the thing practically safe. Accordingly I lighted a small fire of the driest wood to be found, while the trapper stole up and down the brook, moving with infinite stealth and dexterity, tracking down fish and catching them with his hands under the stones.

Soon he had enough for a meal--and, my word! it was a feast for emperors or angels. We stuffed the pink dainties with mint, and baked them in b.a.l.l.s of clay. It seemed as if I had not eaten before in years.

We tried to rouse Cross sufficiently to enable him to eat, and in a small way succeeded; but the effect upon him was scarcely beneficial, it appeared to us. His fever increased, and when we started out once more under our burden, the motion inseparable from our progress affected his head, and he began to talk incoherently to himself.

Nothing can be imagined more weird and startling than was the sound of this voice above us, when we first heard it. Both Enoch and I instinctively stopped. For the moment we could not tell whence the sound came, and I know not what wild notions about it flashed through my mind.

Even when we realized that it was the fever-loosed tongue of our companion which spoke, the effect was scarcely less uncanny. Though I could not see him, the noise of his ceaseless talking came from a point close to my head; he spoke for the most part in a bold, high voice--unnaturally raised above the pitch of his recent faint waking utterances. Whenever a fallen log or jutting bowlder gave us a chance to rest our load without the prospect of too much work in hoisting it again, we would set the canoe down, and that moment his lips would close. There seemed to be some occult connection between the motion of our walking and the activity of his disordered brain.

For a long time--of course in a very disconnected way--he babbled about his mother, and of people, presumably English, of whom I knew nothing, save that one name, Digby, was that of his elder brother Then there began to be interwoven with this talk stray mention of Daisy's name, and soon the whole discourse was of her.

The freaks of delirium have little significance, I believe, as clews to the saner courses of the mind, but he spoke only gently in his imaginary speeches to his wife. I had to listen, plodding wearily along with aching shoulders under the burden of the boat, to fond, affectionate words addressed to her in an incessant string. The thread of his ideas seemed to be that he had arrived home, worn-out and ill, and that he was resting his head upon her bosom. Over and over again, with tiresome iteration, he kept entreating plaintively: "You _are_ glad to see me? You do _truly_ forgive me, and love me?"

Nothing could have been sadder than to hear him. I reasoned that this ceaseless dwelling upon the sweets of a tender welcome doubtless reflected the train of his thoughts during the journey down from the battle-field.

He had forborne to once mention Daisy's name during the whole voyage, but he must have thought deeply, incessantly of her--in all likelihood with a great softening of heart and yearning for her compa.s.sionate nursing. It was not in me to be unmoved by this. I declare that as I went painfully forward, with this strangely pathetic song of pa.s.sion repeating itself in my ears, I got fairly away from the habit of mind in which my own love for Daisy existed, and felt myself only an agent in the working out of some sombre and exalted romance.

In Foxe's account of the English martyrs there are stories of men at the stake who, when a certain stage of the torture was reached, really forgot their anguish in the emotional ecstasy of the ideas born of that terrible moment. In a poor and imperfect fashion I approached that same strange state--not far removed, in sober fact, from the delirium of the man in the canoe.

The shadows were lengthening in the woods, and the reddening blaze of the sun flared almost level in our eyes through the tree-trunks, when at last we had crossed the water-shed of the two creeks, and stood looking down into the gulf of which I have so often spoken heretofore.

We rested the canoe upon a great rock in the mystic circle of ancient Indian fire worship, and leaned, tired and panting, against its side. My arm was giving me much pain, and what with insufficient food and feverish sleep, great immediate fatigue, and the vast nervous strain of these past six days, I was well-nigh swooning.

"I fear I can go no farther, Enoch," I groaned. "I can barely keep my feet as it is."

The trapper himself was as close to utter exhaustion as one may be and have aught of spirit left, yet he tried to speak cheerily.

"Come, come!" he said, "we mustn't give out now, right here at the finish. Why, it's only down over that bridge, and up again--and there we are!"

I smiled in a sickly way at him, and strove to nerve myself manfully for a final exertion. "Very well," I made answer. "Just a moment's more rest, and we'll at it again."

While we stood half reclining against the bowlder, looking with trepidation at the stiff ascent before us on the farther side of the gulf, the scene of the old quarrel of our youth suddenly came to my mind.

"Do you see that spruce near the top, by the path--the one hanging over the edge? Five years ago I was going to fight this Philip Cross there, on that path. My little n.i.g.g.e.r Tulp ran between us, and he threw him head over heels to the bottom. The lad has never been himself since."

"Pretty tolerable fall," remarked Enoch, glancing down the precipitous, brush-clad wall of rock. "But a n.i.g.g.e.r lands on his head as a cat does on her feet, and it only scratches him where it would kill anybody else."

We resumed our burden now, and made our way with it down the winding path to the bottom. Here I was fain to surrender once for all.

"It is no use, Enoch," I said, resolutely. "I can't even try to climb up there with this load. You must wait here; I will go ahead to Cairncross, prepare them for his coming, and send down some slaves to fetch him the rest of the way."

The great square mansion reared before me a closed and inhospitable front.

The shutters of all the windows were fastened. Since the last rain no wheels had pa.s.sed over the carriage-way. For all the signs of life visible, Cairncross might have been uninhabited a twelve-month.

It was only when I pushed my way around to the rear of the house, within view of the stables and slave quarters, that I learned the place had not been abandoned. Half a dozen n.i.g.g.e.rs, dressed in their holiday, church-going raiment, were squatting in a close circle on the gra.s.s, intent upon the progress of some game. Their interest in this was so deep that I had drawn near to them, and called a second time, before they became aware of my presence.

They looked for a minute at me in a perplexed way--my mud-baked clothes, unshaven face, and general unkempt condition evidently rendering me a stranger in their eyes. Then one of them screamed: "Golly! Ma.s.s' Douw's ghost!" and the nimble cowards were on their feet and scampering like scared rabbits to the orchard, or into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the great house.

So I was supposed to be dead! Curiously enough, it had not occurred to me before that this would be the natural explanation of my failure to return with the others. The idea now gave me a queer quaking sensation about the heart, and I stood stupidly staring at the back balcony of the house, with my mind in a whirl of confused thoughts. It seemed almost as if I _had_ come back from the grave.

While I still stood, faint and bewildered, trying to regain control of my ideas, the door opened, and a white-faced lady, robed all in black, came swiftly out upon the porch. It was Daisy, and she was gazing at me with distended eyes and parted lips, and clinging to the carved bal.u.s.trade for support.

As in a dream I heard her cry of recognition, and knew that she was gliding toward me. Then I was on my knees at her feet, burying my face in the folds of her dress, and moaning incoherent nothings from sheer exhaustion and rapture.

When at last I could stand up, and felt myself coming back to something like self-possession, a score of eager questions and as many outbursts of deep thanksgiving were in my ears--all from her sweet voice. And I had tongue for none of them, but only looked into her dear face, and patted her hands between mine, and trembled like a leaf with excitement. So much was there to say, the sum of it beggared language.

When finally we did talk, I was seated in a great chair one of the slaves had brought upon the sward, and wine had been fetched me, and my dear girl bent gently over me from behind, softly resting my head against her waist, her hands upon my arms.

"You shall not look me in the face again," she said--with ah! such compa.s.sionate, tender playfulness--"until I have been told. How did you escape? Were you a prisoner? Were you hurt?"--and oh! a host of other things.

Suddenly the sky seemed to be covered with blackness, and the joy in my heart died out as by the stroke of death. I had remembered something. My parched and twitching lips did their best to refuse to form the words:

"I have brought Philip home. He is sorely wounded. Send the slaves to bring him from the gulf."

After a long silence, I heard Daisy's voice, clear and without a tremor, call out to the blacks that their master had been brought as far as the gulf beyond, and needed a.s.sistance. They started off helter-skelter at this, with many exclamations of great surprise, a bent and misshapen figure dragging itself with a grotesque limping gait at their tail.

I rose from my chair, now in some measure restored to calmness and cold resolution. In mercy I had been given a brief time of blind happiness--of bliss without the alloy of a single thought. Now I must be a man, and walk erect, unflinching, to the sacrifice.

"Let us go and meet them. It is best," I said. The poor girl raised her eyes to mine, and their startled, troubled gaze went to my heart. There must have been prodigious effort in the self-command of her tone to the slaves, for her voice broke down utterly now, as she faltered:

"You have--brought--him home! For what purpose? How will this all end? It terrifies me!"

We had by tacit consent begun to walk down the path toward the road. It was almost twilight. I remember still how the swallows wheeled swiftly in the air about the eaves, and how their twittering and darting seemed to confuse and tangle my thoughts.

The situation was too sad for silence. I felt the necessity of talking, of uttering something which might, at least, make pretence of occupying these wretched minutes, until I should say:

"This is your husband--and farewell!"

"It was clear enough to me," I said. "My duty was plain. I would have been a murderer had I left him there to die. It was very strange about my feelings. Up to a certain moment they were all bitter and merciless toward him. So many better men than he were dead about me, it seemed little enough that his life should go to help avenge them. Yet when the moment came--why, I could not suffer it. Not that my heart relented--no; I was still full of rage against him. But none the less it was my duty to save his life."

"And to bring him home to _me_." She spoke musingly, completing my sentence.

"Why, Daisy, would you have had it otherwise? Could I have left him there, to die alone, helpless in the swamp?"

"I have not said you were not right, Douw," she answered, with saddened slowness. "But I am trying to think. It is so hard to realize--coming like this. I was told you were both dead. His name was reported in their camp, yours among our people. And now you are both here--and it is all so strange, so startling--and what is right seems so mingled and bound up with what is cruel and painful! Oh, I cannot think! What will come of it?

How will it all end?"

"We must not ask how it will end!" I made answer, with lofty decision.

"That is not our affair. We can but do our duty--what seems clearly right--and bear results as they come. There is no other way. You ought to see this."

"Yes, I ought to see it," she said, slowly and in a low, distressed voice.