The Lost Hunter Part 45

It seemed to Holden, so insensibly glided his last waking thought into his dreams making one continuous whole, that the portrait he had been looking at was a living person, and he was astonished that he had mistaken a living being for a piece of painted canvas. In a stern, deep voice the man who had taken possession of the chair in which he himself had been sitting, ordered him to approach. If Holden had been so disposed, he had no ability to disobey the command. He, therefore advanced towards the figure, and at a signal knelt down at his feet.

The man, thereupon, stretching out his hands, laid them upon his head in the att.i.tude of benediction. He then rose from his seat, and making a sign to Holden to follow him, they noiselessly descended the stairs together, and pa.s.sed into the moonlight. The man constantly preceding him, they went on, and by familiar paths and roads, and in the ordinary time that would be required to accomplish the distance, arrived at a spot on the banks of the Wootuppocut well known to Holden. Here the stranger stopped, and seating himself upon the trunk of a felled tree, motioned to his companion to be seated. Holden obeyed, waiting for what should follow. Presently he saw two figures, a male and female, approaching. The latter was veiled, and although the face of the man was exposed, it swam in such a hazy indistinctness that it was impossible to make out the features. Still it seemed to him that they were not entirely unknown, and he tormented himself with ineffectual attempts to determine where he had seen them. He turned to his guide to ask who they were, but before he could speak the stranger of the portrait placed his fingers on his lips, as if to require silence. The two persons advanced until they reached a small brook that babbled down a ravine, and fell into the river. Suddenly something glittered in the air; the figures vanished; and upon looking at the brook Holden beheld, to his horror, that it was red like blood.

He turned in amazement to his guide, who made no reply to the look of inquiry, unless the word "Friday," which he uttered in the same deep tone, can be so considered.

Holden awoke, and the sweat was standing in great drops on his forehead. As his senses and recollection were gradually returning, he directed his eyes towards the place where the portrait hung, half in doubt whether he should see it again. The beams of the moon no longer played upon it, but there was sufficient light in the room to enable him to distinguish the features which now, more and more distinctly emerged to sight. The hollow eyes were fixed on his, and the word "Friday" seemed still quivering on the lips.

Holden lay and thought over his dream. With the young and imaginative, dreams are not uncommon, but with the advanced in life they are usually unfrequent. As the fancy decays,--as the gay illusions that brightened our youth disappear, to give place to realities,--as the blood that once rushed hurriedly, circulates languidly--farewell to the visions that in storm or sunshine flitted around our pillows.

It cannot, indeed, be said that Holden never had dreams. The excitable temperament of the man would forbid the supposition, but, even with him, they were uncommon. He turned the one he had just had over and over again, in his mind; but, reflect upon it as he pleased, he could make nothing out of it, and, at last, with a sense of dissatisfaction and endeavoring to divert his mind from thoughts that banished sleep, he forgot himself again.

His slumbers were broken and hara.s.sed throughout the night, with horrid dreams and vague antic.i.p.ations of further evil. At one time he was at his cabin, and his son lay bleeding in his arms, pierced by the bullet of Ohquamehud. At another, Faith was drowning, and stretching out her hands to him for succor, and as he attempted to hasten to her a.s.sistance, her father interfered and held him violently back. And at another, he was falling from an immeasurable height, with the grip of the Indian at his throat. Down--down he fell, countless miles, through a roaring chaos, trying to save himself from strangulation, until, just as he was about to be dashed to pieces against a rock, he awoke sore and feverish.

The sun was already some distance above the horizon as Holden rose from his troubled slumbers. The cool air of morning flowed with a refreshing sweetness through the open window, and the birds were singing in the branches of the large elm. With a feeling of welcome he beheld the grateful light. He endeavored to recall and reduce to some coherency the wild images of his dreams, but all was confusion, which became the more bewildering, the longer he dwelt upon them, and the more he strove to untangle the twisted skein. All that he could now distinctly remember, were the place whither he had been led, and the word spoken by the portrait.

When he descended to breakfast, both Mr. Armstrong and his daughter remarked his disordered appearance, and anxiously inquired, how he had pa.s.sed the night. To these inquiries, he frankly admitted, that he had been disturbed by unpleasant dreams.

"You look," said Mr. Armstrong, "like the portrait which hangs in the chamber where you slept. It is," he continued, unheeding the warning looks of Faith, "the portrait of my father, and was taken a short time before he was seized with what was called a fit of insanity, and which was said to have hastened his death.

"How is it possible, dear father, you can say so?" said Faith, anxious to prevent an impression she was afraid might be made on Holden's mind.

"I do not mean," continued Armstrong, with a singular persistency, "that Mr. Holden's features resemble the portrait very much; but there is something which belongs to the two in common. Strange that I never thought of it before!"

Holden during the conversation had sat with drooping lids, and a sad and grieved expression, and now, as he raised his eyes, he said, mournfully--

"Thou meanest, James, that I, too, am insane. May Heaven grant that neither thou nor thine may experience the sorrow of so great a calamity."

Faith was inexpressibly shocked. Had any one else spoken thus, with a knowledge of Holden's character, she would have considered him unfeeling to the last degree, but she knew her father's considerateness and delicacy too well to ascribe it to any other cause than to a wandering of thought, which had of late rapidly increased, and excited in her mind an alarm which she trembled to give shape to.

Before she could interpose, Armstrong again spoke--

"Insane!" he said. "What is it to be insane? It is to have faculties exalted beyond the comprehension of the mult.i.tude; to soar above the grovelling world. Their eyes are too weak to bear the glory, and, because they are blind, they think others cannot see. The fools declared my father was insane. They say the same of you, Holden, and, the next thing, I shall be insane, I suppose. Ha, ha!"

Holden himself was startled. He muttered something indistinctly before he answered--

"May the world never say that of thee, dear James!"

"Why not?" inquired Armstrong, eagerly. "Alas! you consider me unworthy to be admitted to the n.o.ble band of misunderstood and persecuted men? True, true! I know it to be true. My earthly instincts fetter me to earth. Of the earth, I am earthy. But what shall prevent my standing afar off, to admire them? What a foolish world is this!

Were not the prophets and apostles denounced as insane men? I have it, I have it," he added, after a pause, "inspiration is insanity."

Holden looked inquiringly at Faith, whose countenance evinced great distress; then, turning to Armstrong, he said--

"Thou art not well, James. Perhaps, like me, thou hast pa.s.sed a disturbed night?"

"I have, of late been unable to sleep as well as formerly," said Armstrong. "There is a pain here," he added, touching his forehead, "which keeps me awake."

"Thou needest exercise. Thou dost confine thyself too much. Go more into the open air, to drink in the health that flows down from the pure sky."

"It is what I urge frequently on my dear father," said Faith.

"Faith is an angel," said Holden. "Listen to her advice. Thou canst have no better guide."

"She shall redeem my soul from death," said Armstrong.

When Holden left the house of his host, he determined to carry into effect a resolution which, it appeared now to himself, he had strangely delayed, such was the influence what he had just seen and heard exercised over him. That Fate or mathematical Providence, however, in which he so devoutly believed, notwithstanding he acted as though none existed, seemed as if, tired out with his procrastination and irresolution, determined to precipitate events and force him to lift the veil, that for so many years--with a wayward temper and love of mystery, inexplicable by any motives that regulate the movements of ordinary minds--he had chosen to spread around himself. What followed only convinced him more thoroughly, if that were possible, of his helplessness on the surging tide of life and of the delusion of those who imagine they are aught but bubbles, breaking now this moment, now that, according to a predetermined order.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

We receive but what we give And in our life alone does nature live.

COLERIDGE.

Mr. Armstrong was disposed to gratify his daughter, and to follow the advice of Holden. That very morning, soon after the departure of the Solitary, he accepted an invitation from Judge Bernard, to take a drive with him to one of his farms in the afternoon. Accordingly, the one-horse chaise, which was the usual vehicle in those days, of gentlemen who drove themselves, stopped, late in the day, at Armstrong's door.

"Anne hopes," said the Judge, as they were about to start, "that in retaliation for my capture of your father, Faith, you will come and take possession of her. For my own part, if I can bring him back with a little more color in his cheeks, I shall expect a kiss or two."

"You shall have three, dear Judge, for every smile you can win from father," exclaimed Faith.

The road which the gentlemen took, led, at first, after leaving the table-land on which their houses were situated, through the thickly-settled and business part of the town, at the head of the Severn, the whole of which it traversed, and then approaching the banks of the Wootuppocut, followed its windings in a direction towards its source. The country through which the river flowed presented an appearance of soft and varied beauty, the view of which, while the cool breeze across the stream fanned the fevered brain of Armstrong, ought, if anything could, to have soothed his jarring nerves, and breathed a portion of its own tranquillity into his heart. Is it not true what the sweet poet sings of Nature and her lover, that

"She glides Into his darker musings with a mild And gentle sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness ere he is aware?"

The river, for the greater part of the drive, flowed through a valley, which it divided into two very unequal portions, skirting occasionally with its left bank the woods that ran quite down the sides of the hills to the water, and then winding away to the right, leaving considerable intervals of level land betwixt itself and the woods above mentioned, but, almost invariably, having still wider expanses of champaign, that gradually ascended from the stream, until it met the forest-covered hills that bounded the valley, on the right. In some instances, the woods extended on both sides down to the river, throwing an agreeable shade over the way-farers, and shedding abroad a cool, moist freshness, that brought with itself a woodland-scent, compounded of the fragrance of sa.s.safras, and fern, and sweet-briar, and mosses, and unknown plants. Then, again the road would run for a considerable distance through an open s.p.a.ce, unshaded by trees, to cross, a little further on, another belt of woods, thus making their darkened recesses doubly grateful from the contrast of alternating light and shade, while all along the stream murmured a soft expression of thanks for the lovely country it irrigated, for the blue sky, that mirrored itself in its bosom with floating clouds, for the sunshine sparkling on its ripples, and for the overhanging woods, and birds, that sung among the branches.

The disordered spirit of Armstrong was not insensible to the charm.

He gazed round, and drank in the beauty by which he was surrounded.

He scented the sweetness of the woods, and it seemed to impart an agreeable exhilaration. In the pauses of the conversation, hitherto carried on almost entirely by Judge Bernard, he listened to the monotonous, yet soothing flow of the water, and it sounded like an invitation to cast off trouble. As he listened the shooting pain in his head diminished, his thoughts became less sombre, and he surrendered himself to something like enjoyment. Very soon it seemed as if he were exerting himself to be agreeable to his companion, and to make up, by taking a more active part in the conversation, for former silence and neglect.

"This clear river," he said, "this beautiful valley, with its quiet woods, are a blessing to me to-day. It is a pleasure to breathe the air. Has Italy bluer skies?"

"The encomiums of travellers on the skies of Italy are to be received by us with some qualification," answered the Judge. "They are mostly written by Englishmen, and the comparison is between the humid climate of England and the drier one of Italy. This being borne in mind, the praises lavished on Italian skies are just. But as compared with ours, they can boast of little or no superiority in beauty. I have seen as gorgeous heavens in my own country as ever glorified the land of the Caesars."

"And how is it with the landscape?"

"There we must yield to Europe. We have nothing to be compared with the grandeur of the Swiss mountains, or the combination of loveliness and magnificence around the lake of Geneva."

"But Niagara!"

"Aye, Niagara! unequalled and alone. There can be but one Niagara."

"And the Alleghany and White Mountains?"

"Fine scenery, but hills in comparison with the mountains of Switzerland."

"And now for the works of man. You must have been struck by the contrast between the towns in our own country and in Europe."

"Yes, certainly, the difference is great."