A Final Scene in the Gulf which My Eyes Are Mercifully Spared.
Just before daybreak of the fifth day we stole past the sleeping hamlet of
Caughnawaga, and as the sun was rising over the Schoharie hills I drew up
the canoe into the outlet of Dadanoscara Creek, a small brook which came
down through the woods from the high land whereon Cairncross stood. Our
journey by water was ended.
Enoch was waiting for us, and helped me lift Cross from the canoe. His
body hung inert in our arms; not even my clumsy slipping on the bank of
the rivulet startled him from the deep sleep in which he had lain for
hours in the boat.
"I have been frightened. Can he be dying?" I asked.
Enoch knelt beside him, and put his hand over the patient's heart. He
shook his head dubiously after a moment, and said: "It's tearing along
like a racehorse. He's in a fever--the worst kind. This ain't
sleep--it's stupor."
He felt the wounded man's pulse and temples. "If you're bent on saving his
life," he added, "you'd better scoot off and get some help. Before we can
make another litter for him, let alone taking him up this creek-bed to
his house, it may be too late. If we had a litter ready, it might be
different. As it is, I don't see but you will have to risk it, and bring
somebody here."
For once in my life my brain worked in flashes. I actually thought of
something which had not occurred to Enoch!
"Why not carry him in this canoe?" I asked. "It is lighter than any litter
we could make."
The trapper slapped his lank, leather-clad thigh in high approval. "By
hokey!" he said, "you've hit it!"
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 impassable 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 balls
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 compassionate 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 passion 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 nigger 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 nigger 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 passed 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 niggers, dressed in their holiday,
church-going raiment, were squatting in a close circle on the grass,
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! Mass' Douw's
ghost!" and the nimble cowards were on their feet and scampering like
scared rabbits to the orchard, or into the basement 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 balustrade
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
compassionate, 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 assistance. 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.
As she spoke there rose in my mind a sudden consciousness that perhaps my
wisdom was at fault. How was it that I--a coarse-fibred male animal,
returned from slaughter, even now with the blood of fellow-creatures on my
hands--should be discoursing of duty and of good and bad to this pure and
gentle and sweet-souled woman? What was my title to do this?--to rebuke
her for not seeing the right? Had I been in truth generous? Rather had I
not, in the purely selfish desire to win my own self-approbation, brought
pain and perplexity down upon the head of this poor woman? I had thought
much of my own goodness--my own strength of purpose and self-sacrifice and
fidelity to duty. Had I given so much as a mental glance at the effect of
my acts upon the one whom, of all others, I should have first guarded from
trouble and grief?
My tongue was tied. Perhaps I had been all wrong. Perhaps I should not
have brought back to her the man whose folly and obstinacy had so
well-nigh wrecked her life. I could no longer be sure. I kept silence,
feeling indirectly now that her woman's instinct would be truer and better
than my logic. She was thinking; she would find the real right and wrong.
Ah, no! To this day we are not settled in our minds, we two old people, as
to the exact balance between duty and common-sense in that strange
question of our far-away youth.
There broke upon our ears, of a sudden, as we neared the wooded crest of
the gulf, a weird and piercing scream--an unnatural and repellent yell,
like a hyena's horrid hooting! It rose with terrible distinctness from the
thicket close before us. As its echoes returned, we heard confused sounds
of other voices, excited and vibrant.
Daisy clutched my arm, and began hurrying me forward, impelled by some
formless fear of she knew not what.
"It is Tulp," she murmured, as we went breathlessly on. "Oh, I should have
kept him back! Why did I not think of it?"
"What about Tulp?" I asked, with difficulty keeping beside her in the
narrow path. "I had no thought of him. I did not see him. He was not among
the others, was he?"
"He has gone mad!"
"What--Tulp, poor boy? Oh, not as bad as that, surely! He has been strange
and slow of wit for years, but--"
"Nay, the tidings of your death--you know I told you we heard that you
were dead--drove him into perfect madness. I doubt he knew you when you
came. Only yesterday we spoke of confining him, but poor old father
pleaded not. When you see Tulp, you shall decide. Oh! what has happened?
Who is this man?"
In the path before us, some yards away, appeared the tall, gaunt form of
Enoch, advancing slowly. In the dusk of the wooded shades behind him
huddled the group of slaves. They bore nothing in their hands. Where was
the canoe? They seemed affrighted or oppressed by something out of the
common, and Enoch, too, wore a strange air. What could it mean?
When Enoch saw us he lifted his hand in a warning gesture.
"Have her go back!" he called out, with brusque sharpness.
"Will you walk back a little?" I asked her. "There is something here we do
not understand. I will join you in a moment.
"For God's sake, what is it, Enoch?" I demanded, as I confronted him.
"Tell me quick."
"Well, we've had our five days' tussle for nothing, and you're minus a
nigger. That's about what it comes to."
"Speak out, can't you! Is he dead? What was the yell we heard?"
"It was all done like a flash of lightning. We were coming up the side
nighest us here--we had got just where that spruce, you know, hangs
over--when all at once that hump-backed nigger of yours raised a scream
like a painter, and flung himself head first against the canoe. Over it
went, and he with it--rip, smash, plumb to the bottom!"
The negroes broke forth in a babel of mournful cries at this, and
clustered about us. I grew sick and faint under this shock of fresh
horrors, and was fain to lean on Enoch's arm, as I turned to walk back to
where I had left Daisy. She was not visible as we approached, and I closed
my eyes in abject terror of some further tragedy.
Thank God, she had only swooned, and lay mercifully senseless in the tall
grass, her waxen face upturned in the twilight.