The left arm of the Missionary had suffered from the flames; Luxima was
the first to perceive it: she applied to it the only remedy which nature
afforded them in a spot so desolate; and the ingenuity of love, and of
necessity, supplied the place of skill. She gathered from the
neighbouring spring, the oily _naptha_, whose volatile and subtil fluid
so frequently floats on the surface of Indian wells, and, steeping in it
the fragment of her veil, she bound it round the arm of her patient.
Thus engaged, the thoughts of the wanderers, by a natural association,
mutually reverted to their first interview in the grotto of
Congelations; when the rigid distinctions of prejudice first gave way to
an impulse of humanity, and the Priestess of Brahma, no less in fear
than pity, bound up the wound of him whom she then deemed it a sacrilege
to approach! The sympathy of the recollection was visible in the
disorder of their looks, which were studiously averted from each other;
and the Neophyte, endeavouring to turn the thoughts of her spiritual
guide from a subject she trembled to revert to, spoke of the danger
which he had recently incurred for her sake, and spoke of it with all
the fervour which characterized her eloquence.
The Missionary replied with the circumspect reserve of one who feared
to trust his feelings: he said, “That which I have done _for thee_, I
would have done for another, for it is the spirit of the religion I
profess, to sacrifice the selfish instinct of our nature to the
preservation of a fellow-creature whose danger claims our interference,
or whose happiness needs our protection.”
“Oh! Father,” she returned in emotion, “refer not to thy faith alone, a
sentiment inherent in thyself; let us be more just _to him_ who made us,
and believe, that there is in nature, a feeling of benevolence which
betrays the original intention of the Deity, to promote the happiness of
his creatures. If thou art prone to pity the wretched, and aid the
weak, it is because thou wast thyself created of those particles which,
at an infinite distance, constitute the Divine essence.”
The Missionary interrupted her by a look of reprehension; he knew such
was the doctrine, and such the phrase of the Brahmins, with respect to
those of their holy men who led a religious and sinless life: but he
felt, at the moment, how little claim he had to make any application of
it to himself.
“Thy religion, at least,” continued Luxima, with softness and timidity,
“forbids not the expression of _gratitude_. It is said in the Shaster,
that the first thought of Brahma, when created by the great Spirit, was
a sentiment of gratitude; he offered up thanks to the Author of his
existence, for the gift of life, and a reasonable soul: is then the
Christian doctrine less amiable than that I have abandoned? and, if
through thee, my life has been preserved, and my soul enlightened, must
I stifle in my heart, the gratitude thou hast awakened there?”
“Luxima” exclaimed the Missionary, with vehemence, “_all_ sentiments
merely of the heart are dangerous, and to be distrusted; whatever
soothes the passions, tends to cherish them,--whatever affords pleasure,
endangers virtue,--and even the love we bear to Heaven, we should try,
were it possible, to separate from the happiness which that love
confers Oh! Luxima, it is a dangerous habit,--the habit of enjoying any
earthly good, and until now--” he broke off suddenly, and sighed, then
added, “Thou talkest much of gratitude, Luxima; but wherefore? It was
for Heaven I sought thee--it is for Heaven I saved thee! It was not for
_thy_ sake, nor for mine, that I lured thee from the land of the
unbelieving, or that I would risk a thousand lives to save thine,--it is
for _his_ sake, whose servant I am. But, if _thou_ talkest of gratitude,
to whom is it due? _Art thou not here?_ in dreary deserts, encompassed
round by danger and by death: to follow me, thou art here,--thou, the
native of an earthly paradise,--the idol of a nation’s homage. Oh! I
should have left thy pure soul, all innocent as it was of voluntary
error, to return to its Creator, untried by the dangers, unassailed by
the tempting evils of passion and of life, virtuous in thy illusions,
pure from the errors and misfortunes of humanity, an inmate fit for the
Heaven which awaited thee.”
“Be that Heaven my witness,” returned Luxima, with devotion and
solemnity, “that I would not for the happiness I have abandoned, and the
glory I have lost, resign that desert, whose perilous solitudes I share
with thee. Oh! my father, and my friend, thou alone hast taught me to
know, that the paradise of woman is the creation of her heart; that it
is not the light or air of Heaven, though beaming brightness, and
breathing fragrance, nor all that is loveliest in nature’s scenes, which
form the _sphere_ of _her_ existence and enjoyment!--it is alone the
presence of _him she loves_: it is that mysterious sentiment of the
heart, which diffuses a finer sense of life through the whole being; and
which resembles, in its singleness and simplicity, the _primordial
idea_, which, in the religion of my fathers, is supposed to have
preceded _time_ and _worlds_, and from which all created good has
emanated.”
The Missionary arose, in disorder; he turned, for a moment, his eyes on
Luxima: the glow which mantled to her brow, the bashful confusion of her
look, the modesty with which she drew her veil over her downcast eyes,
spoke the involuntary error of one, whose ardent feelings had for a
moment over-ruled the circumspect reserve of a rigid virtue. He sighed
profoundly, and withdrew his glance. Luxima now also arose; and they
were both proceeding on in silence, when a rustling in the thicket was
distinctly heard, and the next moment a large but meagre dog sprang
forward, followed by an Indian, on whose dark and melancholy countenance
the light of the moon fell brightly; a scanty garment, woven of the
fibres of trees, partially concealed his slender and worn form; an
Indian pipe was suspended from his girdle; and he leaned, as he paused,
to gaze on the wanderers, upon a huntsman’s _spear_. But, scarcely had
he fixed his haggard eyes on the brow of Luxima, which still bore the
consecrated _mark of the tellertum_,[9] than he fell prostrate on the
earth, in token of reverential homage. Luxima shrieked, and hiding her
head in the bosom of the Missionary, exclaimed “Let us fly, or we are
lost! it is a _pariah_!”
The _unfortunate_, rising from the earth, and withdrawing a few paces,
said, in a timid and respectful accent:--“I am indeed of that wretched
cast, who live under the curse of Heaven--an outcast! an alien! I claim
no country, I _own no kindred_; but still I am human, and can pity in
others the suffering I myself endure: I ask not the daughter of Heaven,
who sprang from the head of Brahma, to repose beneath the roof of a
pariah; but I will conduct her to a spot less perilous than this, and I
will lay at her feet the pulp of the young cocoa-nut, which grows by the
side of my hut; and when the morning star dawns above yonder forest, I
will guide her steps to a path of safety, and teach her how to shun the
abode of the wild beast, and to avoid the nest of the serpent.”
To these humane offers, Luxima replied only by tears: an _outcast_
herself, the unconquerable prejudice and religious pride of the cast she
had forfeited, still operated with unabated influence on her mind, and
she shuddered when she beheld the Missionary stretch out his hands and
press in their grateful clasp those of the unfortunate and benevolent
_pariah_: he had been the saviour of the life of her he loved; for it
was the music of his sylvan reed, which had seduced the serpent from his
prey, and the point of his spear was still red with the blood of the
reptile he had destroyed.[10]
But for the first time, neither the example nor the persuasions of the
Missionary had any effect upon the mind of his neophyte. Suddenly
awakened to all the tyranny of habitual prejudice and superstitious
fear, she rejected the repose and safety to be found beneath the shadow
of a pariah’s _hut_, she rejected the fruit planted by a pariah’s hand;
and the pride of a Brahmin’s daughter, and the bigotry of a Brahmin
priestess, still governed the conduct of the excommunicated _chancalas_,
still over-ruled the reason of the Christian neophyte: accepting,
therefore, only the advice of the unhappy pariah, who directed them to a
woody path, by which they might soonest gain the caravan road, and who
taught them how to avoid whatever was most dangerous in these
unfrequented wilds, they again re-commenced their wanderings. The
Missionary, with difficulty guiding the Arabian through the intricacies
of the forest-path, remained silent and thoughtful; while Luxima,
fearing that she had displeased him by an unconquerable obstinacy, which
had its foundation in the earliest habits and feelings of her life,
sought to cheer his mind and amuse his attention by the repetition of
some of those mythological romances, which had formed a part of her
professional acquirements. But the Missionary, alive to dangers which in
his society _she_ felt not, and borne down by the recent disappointment
of his flattering hopes, of which _she_ was ignorant, gave not to her
brilliant and eloquent details, the wonted look of half-repressed
transport, the wonted reserved smile of tenderness and admiration; his
whole thoughts rested in a faint expectation of overtaking the caravan,
which moved slowly, and which had taken a more circuitous road than that
to which the pariah had directed him.
In the unfrequented wilds through which they now passed, no trace of
human life appeared, save that once, and at an immense distance, they
beheld the arms of some Indian troops glittering brightly to the
moon-beams; but the welcome spectacle passed away like a midnight
phantom; and, that again they observed a circle of glimmering fires,
before which the remote shadows of an elephant’s form seemed to pass.
Luxima, acquainted with the customs of her country, believed this
spectacle to belong to a hunting match of elephants; a diversion in
India truly royal. At last, having recovered the traces of the caravan,
which were deeply impressed on the soil, they found themselves on a wild
and marshy waste, skirted by the impenetrable forest, from whose gloom
they now emerged;--the earth trembled beneath their sinking feet, and
particles of light arising from putrescent substances, rose like meteors
before them; while frequently the high jungle grass, almost surmounting
the lofty figure of the Missionary, stubbornly resisted the efforts
which he made with his extended arms to clear a passage for the animal
on which Luxima was mounted;--the moon, suddenly absorbed in clouds,
left them with “_danger and with darkness compassed round_;”--while the
low and sullen murmurs of the elements foretold a rising storm.
Exhausted by heat and by fatigue, no longer able to perceive the track
of the caravan, the unfortunate wanderers sought only to avoid the
dreadful inclemency of the moment: sounds of horror mingled in the wild
expanse; the hiss of serpents, and the yell of ferocious animals which
instinctively sought shelter amidst the profound depths of the forest,
(whose mighty trees, bending their summits to the sweeping blast, rolled
like billows in deep and dying murmurs) all around bowed as in awful
reverence to the omnipotent voice of nature, thus pouring her accents of
terror in the deep roll of endless thunder; the crash of shattered
rocks, the groans of torn-up trees, and all those images of terror
which mark the _land-tempests_ in those mighty regions, where even
destruction wears an aspect of magnificence and sublimity, all struck
upon the soul of the fainting Indian, and left there an impression never
to be effaced. It was then that the religion which she had abandoned,
less from _conviction_ than from _love_, and the superstitious errors
which were still latent in her mind, resumed at this moment (to her, of
dreadful retribution) all their former influence; and she felt the wrath
of Heaven in every flash of lightning which darted round her head: for
the mind long devoted to an illusion interwoven with all its ideas,
however it may abandon its influence in the repose of safety, or the
blessings of enjoyment, still clings to it, as to a resource, in
suffering and in danger; and, contrite for the transient apostacy, adds
the energy of repentance to the zeal of returning faith.
The Missionary, who beheld remorse in the bosom of his proselyte
strengthening under the dangers which had awakened it, in vain
endeavoured to soothe and to support her; she shrank from his arms, and,
prostrate on the earth, invoked those deities whom she still believed to
have been the tutelar guardians of the days of her innocence and her
felicity; while he, still feeling only through her, stood near to shield
and to protect her: awed, but not subdued, he presented a fine image of
the majesty of man;--his brow fearlessly raised to meet the lightning’s
flash, a blasted tree in ruins at his feet, and while all lay desolate
and in destruction round him, looking like one whose spirit, unsubdued
by the mighty wreck of matter, defied that threatened annihilation,
which could not reach the immortality it was created to inherit!
The storm ceased in a tremendous crash of the elements, with all the
abrupt grandeur with which it had arisen; and a breathless calm,
scarcely less awful, succeeded to its violence; the clouds dispersed
from the face of the Heavens, and the moon, full and cloudless, rose in
the firmament: every thing urged the departure of the wanderers, for
danger, in various forms, surrounded them.--Luxima, alive to every
existing impression, was cheered even by the solemn calm, but nearly
exhausted and overcome by suffering and fatigue, the Missionary was
obliged to support her on the horse; and though she tried to smile, yet
her silent tears, and uncomplaining sufferings, relaxed the firmness of
his mind; he felt, that, were even her conversion perfected, which he
hourly discovered it was far from being, she would have purchased the
sacred truths of Christianity at the dearest price, and that Heaven
alone could compensate the unhappy and apostate Indian, who thus sought
it at the expence of every earthly good and human happiness.
At length the trees of the forest, on whose remotest skirts they
wandered, gradually disappeared; and, still following the track of the
caravan, which in the course of the night they had again recovered as
well as the moon’s declining light would permit, they crossed a hill,
where it seemed by its impressions on the soil recently to have passed:
they then descended into a boundless plain, dismal, wild, and waste. Ere
the sun had risen in all its fiercest glories above the horizon, they
found themselves surrounded by a desert: the guiding track indeed still
remained; but, in the illimitable waste, far as the eye could stretch
its view, no object which could cheer their hearts, or dispel their
fears, presented itself:--sky and earth alone appeared, alike awful,
and alike unvaried; the heavens, shrouded with a deep red gloom, spread
a boundless canopy to the view, like the concave roof of some
earth-embosomed mine, whose golden veins shine duskily in gloomy
splendour; and the sandy and burning soil, unvaried by a single tree or
shrub, reflected back the scorching ardour of the skies, and mingled its
brilliant surface with the distant horizon; both alike were terrific to
the fancy, and boundless to the eye; both alike struck horror on the
mind, and chased hope from the heart; alike denying all resource,
withholding all relief; while the disconsolate wanderers, as they trod
the burning waste, now turned their looks on the bleak perspective, now
tenderly and despairingly on each other. Convinced that to return or to
advance threatened alike destruction, thus they continued to wander in
the lonesome and desolate wild, enduring the intense heat of the ardent
day, the noxious blast of the chilly night, with no shelter from the
horrors of the clime but what a clump of naked rocks at intervals
afforded them; and when this rude asylum presented itself, the
Missionary spread his robe on the earth for Luxima--endeavouring to
soothe her to repose, only leaving her side to seek some spring, always
vainly sought, or to look for those hardy shrubs which even the desert
sometimes produces, and which frequently treasure in their flowers the
lingering dews of moister seasons; if he found them, it was mouldering
amidst the dry red sand of the soil. At last the delicate animal, which
had hitherto afforded them so much relief and aid, sunk beneath the
intemperature of the clime, and expired at their feet. Luxima was now
borne hopelessly along by the associate and the cause of her sufferings;
and they proceeded slowly and despairingly, their parched and burning
lips, their wearied and exhausted frames, scarcely permitting them to
speak without effort, or to move without pain. But it was for Luxima
only the Missionary suffered--he saw her whom he had found in the
possession of every enjoyment, now almost expiring beneath his eyes; her
lips of roses, scorched by the noxious blasts, and gust after gust of
burning vapour, drying up the vital springs of life; while she,
confounding in her mind her afflictions, and what she believed to be
their cause, offered up faint invocations to appease those powers, whom
love had induced her thus to provoke and to abandon.
It was in moments such as these, that the unfortunate Hilarion beheld
that hope frustrated, which had hitherto solaced him in all the
sufferings he had caused, and those he sustained; it was then that he
felt it was the heart of the woman he had seduced, and not the mind of
the heathen he had converted. At last, wholly overcome by the intense
heat and immoderate fatigue, by insupportable thirst and a long
privation of sustenance and sleep, Luxima was unable to proceed. The
Missionary bore her in his feeble clasp to the base of a rock, which
afforded them some shelter from the rays of the sun. He would have
spoken to her of the Heaven to which her soul seemed already taking its
flight; he would have assured her that his spirit would soon mingle with
hers, and that an eternal union awaited them: but, in a moment, when
love was strengthened by mutual suffering, and despair gave force to
passion, and when each at once only lived and died for the other, words
were poor vehicles to feelings so acute; and sighs, long and deep drawn,
were the only sounds which emotions so profound, so tender, and so
agonizing, would admit of: all was the silence of love unspeakable, and
the awful stillness of dissolution. But when over the beautiful
countenance which lay on his bosom, the Missionary beheld the sudden
convulsion of pain throw its dread distortion,--madness seized the brain
of the frantic lover, and he threw round a look wild and inquiring, but
looked in vain; all was still, hopeless, and desolate. At last,
something like a vapour appeared moving at a distance. He sprung
forward, and, ascending the point of a rock, discovered at a distance a
form which resembled that of a camel: faint as was the hope now
awakened, it spread new life through his whole being; he snatched the
dying Indian to his bosom; strength and velocity seemed a supernatural
gift communicated to his frame; he flew over the burning sand, he
approached the object of his wishes; hope with every step realizes the
blessed vision; human forms grew distinct on his eye, human sounds
vibrate on his ear--“She lives, she is saved!” he exclaims with a
frantic shriek, and falls lifeless beneath his precious burthen in the
midst of the multitude which forms the rear of the caravan. The caravan
had stopped in this place near a spring, accidentally discovered, and
the motley crowd which composed it, were all verging towards one point,
eagerly contending for a draught of muddy water; but the sudden and
extraordinary appearance of the now almost lifeless strangers, excited
an emotion in all who beheld them. The few Hindus who belonged to the
caravan shrank in horror from the unfortunate _Chancalas_, thus so
closely associated with a _frangui_, or impure; but those in whom
religious bigotry had no deadened the feelings of nature, beheld them
with equal pity and admiration. Every assistance which humanity could
devise was administered; and cordials, diluted with water, moistened
lips parched with a long consuming thirst, and recalled to frames nearly
exhausted, the fading powers of life. The Missionary, more overcome by
his anxiety for Luxima, and the sudden transition of his feelings from
despair to hope, than even by weakness, or personal suffering, was the
first to recover consciousness and strength, and love instinctively
claimed the first thought of reviving existence. In the transport of the
moment he forgot the crowd that was its witness; he flew to Luxima, and
shed tears of love and joy on the hands extended to him. He beheld the
vital hues revisiting that cheek which he had lately pressed in hopeless
agony, and saw the light of life beaming in those eyes whose lustre he
had so lately seen darkened by the shades of death. Again, too, the
voice of Luxima addresses him by the endearing epithet of “Father:” and
though the venerated title found no sanction in their looks or years,
yet many who beheld the scene of their re-union were touched by its
affecting tenderness; and a general interest was excited for persons so
noble, and so distinguished in their appearance, so interesting by their
sufferings and misfortunes, which were registered in their looks, and
attested by the singularity of their situations.