OUT IN THE STORM.
As Catharine approached the shore, Elsie came toward her, drifting, as
it were, like a cloud before the storm. “I have followed him, I caught
him; see here!” she cried, with great exultation; “see here! I have torn
off her crown; I have rent away her robe; but they are both gone; gone
into the depths of the sea; that is the way he treats me; always with
her! always with her! and oh, oh! how like a fiend she has grown; she
was never handsome, never; but I have disrobed and uncrowned her; see!
see!”
As she spoke, Elsie held up the crown of a bonnet, to which a trail of
yellow lace was clinging, and a fragment of faded calico. How she had
obtained them, Catharine could only conjecture; and she was now too much
excited for thought on the subject.
“Oh, Elsie! how you have frightened me; let us go home!” she pleaded,
locking her arms with those of the lunatic. “I am wet and cold. Do go
home with me, Elsie!”
“Poor child, poor little dear! Cold is it! Elsie is always cold and wet
too—wet with her own tears. You see the ocean yonder? it was a dry plain
till I wept it full of sorrow; now, see how it heaves and foams, and
laughs at the lightning; all the moans lie at the bottom, for it does
groan heavily at times. When she went into it, I could hear it sigh and
heave and struggle as my heart did when the snake crept around it,
tightening and tightening its coils till I was stifled with groans; but
the ocean has got her now; I am glad that I gave the brave old ocean so
many tears. They have drowned her at last; I heard them gurgle in her
throat. Oh! it was music to hear the strangle. I wish you had heard it—I
wish you had heard it!”
Catharine was seized with sudden horror. Had the poor, demented one
really committed some violence? Or was this talk merely the ravings of
her diseased mind?
There was no more information to be obtained from Elsie. The storm, or
perhaps some encounter in which she had been engaged, rendered her wild
with excitement. She dared the lightning with her pale, clenched hand,
and answered the thunder with shrieks of defiance. She danced with her
shadowy-white feet through the wet meadow-grass, and laughed like a
riotous child, as the rain swept in gusts through her hair.
When they neared the cottage, a change came upon her. She grew still and
hushed, looking forward with breathless awe, and moving with the
noiseless motion of a ghost.
“Hush, hush,” she said, “we may disturb him, and then he will follow her
into the deep waters. Do you think she will stay there though? Who can
keep her there? The monsters of the deep will hurl her back to land; she
is too wicked for them. The serpents that coil and knot themselves among
the rust, and gold, and scattered pearls that lie forever among the
coral branches, down, down where the waters are calm like a baby’s
dream—the serpents, I tell you, will uncoil and slink away into the
black depths of the sea, rather than live with her, though she is their
sister. Oh, if they would keep her. Do you think they can? I sent her
down to them with my mark upon her throat—a hot mark, red as blood. They
will understand it. The mermaids,—listen, my bird of Paradise,—the
mermaids are my friends; I have lived with them years and years. They
have strung pearls on my hair, and that’s what makes it so white. I wish
you could see them floating, floating, floating, with pale green hair
and emerald eyes. They sing, too. Oh, my bird, won’t they sing when she
plunges downward headforemost in her rags, with my mark flaming on her
throat? Hosanna! hallelujah! Roll, roll ye mighty thunders—roll, roll!”
Elsie had uttered the first portion of this wild speech in a hoarse
whisper as she glided by the cottage, but her voice rose as she
proceeded, and at last broke forth into a fierce, reckless chant, like
that with which Rachael electrified an audience, when she raved and
moaned through the liberty chant of France.
Catharine was impressed by the wild poetry that broke more from the eyes
and action of the maniac than from her words. Still, she had an
undercurrent of thought that led her to look wistfully at the cottage as
she passed. The window where she had seen a light was now darkened and
closed; everything was still, and she felt almost as if some fearful
delusion were being practised upon her every way she turned.
The rain had somewhat abated when the two females reached the house; but
even at its height the old people had evidently come forth in search of
their child. Back and forth, among the shrubberies and beneath the old
trees, they wandered, their hands nervously interlocked, and their
feeble voices rising in anxious cries for their daughter.
Elsie heard them, and sprang forward triumphantly.
“Come,” she said, “come, you may breathe now; the air is pure; the earth
may laugh with blossoms without fear of death-tramps from her cloven
feet. Come now, let us sing together, we and the stars!”
She waved her hand toward the sky where a few stars were struggling
through an embankment of clouds, very pale and languid after the vivid
flashes of lightning they had just witnessed.
“Come,” she cried again, “let us laugh, let us sing! Come, come, come!”
Elsie led the way into the house, and went directly toward the library,
leaving wet tracks upon the carpet, and wrapping her dripping garments
close about her.
The old people and Catharine followed in silence, shuddering with the
dampness and chilled with the cold, but carried on by the force of that
insane will.
Elsie flung open the library-door. A gust of wind swept through, meeting
them as they entered from the bay-window, which was open to the night.
“Give me light, light! I would look on him; I will tell him myself.”
Catharine struck a light, which flared and quivered as she held it
upward.
Elsie seized it fiercely and held it above her head, looking upward for
the picture. It was gone; a stained place upon the paper marked the spot
it had occupied, and that was all.
The candle dropped from Elsie’s hand, which was still uplifted as if
paralyzed.
“Gone! Oh, my soul, he has gone with her!”
These words were uttered in a feeble, heart-broken voice, and Elsie
glided away through the darkness into her chamber. For days and weeks
she did not speak again.