"ALL OVER."
Clayton, at the time of the violent assault which we have described,
received an injury upon the head which rendered him insensible.
When he came to himself, he was conscious at first only of a fanning of
summer breezes. He opened his eyes, and looked listlessly up into the
blue sky, that appeared through the thousand leafy hollows of waving
boughs. Voices of birds warbling and calling, like answering echoes, to
each other, fell dreamily on his ear. Some gentle hand was placing
bandages around his head; and figures of women, he did not recognize,
moved whisperingly around him, tending and watching.
He dropped asleep again, and thus for many hours lay in a kind of heavy
trance.
Harry and Lisette had vacated, for his use, their hut; but, as it was
now the splendid weather of October, when earth and sky become a temple
of beauty and serenity, they tended him during the hours of the day in
the open air, and it would seem as if there were no art of healing like
to this. As air and heat and water all have a benevolent tendency to
enter and fill up a vacuum, so we might fancy the failing vitality of
the human system to receive accessions of vigor by being placed in the
vicinity of the healthful growths of nature. All the trees which John
saw around the river of life and heaven bore healing leaves; and there
may be a sense in which the trees of our world bear leaves that are
healing both to body and soul. He who hath gone out of the city, sick,
disgusted, and wearied, and lain himself down in the forest, under the
fatherly shadow of an oak, may have heard this whispered to him in the
leafy rustlings of a thousand tongues.
* * * * * * * * *
"See," said Dred to Harry, as they were watching over the yet
insensible form of Clayton, "how the word of the Lord is fulfilled on
this people. He shall deliver them, every man into the hand of his
neighbor; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey!"
"Yes," said Harry; "but this is a good man; he stands up for our rights.
If he had his way, we should soon have justice done us."
"Yes," said Dred, "but it is even as it was of old; 'behold I send unto
you prophets and wise men, and some of them shall ye slay. For this
people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears have they closed.
Therefore, the Lord shall bring upon this generation the blood of all
the slain, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias,
the son of Barachias, whom they slew between the temple and the altar.'"
* * * * * * * * *
After a day or two spent in a kind of listless dreaming, Clayton was so
far recovered as to be able to sit up and look about him. The serene
tranquillity of the lovely October skies seemed to fall like a spell
upon his soul.
Amidst the wild and desolate swamp, here was an island of security,
where nature took men to her sheltering bosom. A thousand birds,
speaking with thousand airy voices, were calling from breezy tree-tops,
and from swinging cradles of vine-leaves; white clouds sailed, in
changing and varying islands, over the heavy green battlements of the
woods. The wavering, slumberous sound of thousand leaves, through which
the autumn air walked to and fro, consoled him. Life began to look to
him like a troubled dream, forever past. His own sufferings, the hours
of agony and death which he had never dared to remember, seemed now to
wear a new and glorified form. Such is the divine power in which God
still reveals himself through the lovely and incorruptible forms of
nature.
Clayton became interested in Dred, as a psychological study. At first he
was silent and reserved, but attended to the wants of his guest with
evident respect and kindness. Gradually, however, the love of
expression, which lies hidden in almost every soul, began to unfold
itself in him, and he seemed to find pleasure in a sympathetic listener.
His wild jargon of hebraistic phrases, names, and allusions, had for
Clayton, in his enfeebled state, a quaint and poetic interest. He
compared him, in his own mind, to one of those old rude Gothic doorways,
so frequent in European cathedrals, where scriptural images, carved in
rough granite, mingle themselves with a thousand wayward, fantastic
freaks of architecture; and sometimes he thought, with a sigh, how much
might have been accomplished by a soul so ardent and a frame so
energetic, had they been enlightened and guided.
Dred would sometimes come, in the shady part of the afternoon, and lie
on the grass beside him, and talk for hours in a quaint, rambling,
dreamy style, through which there were occasional flashes of practical
ability and shrewdness.
He had been a great traveller--a traveller through regions generally
held inaccessible to human foot and eye. He had explored not only the
vast swamp-girdle of the Atlantic, but the everglades of Florida, with
all their strange and tropical luxuriance of growth; he had wandered
along the dreary and perilous belt of sand which skirts the southern
Atlantic shores, full of quicksands and of dangers, and there he had
mused of the eternal secret of the tides, with whose restless,
never-ceasing rise and fall the soul of man has a mysterious sympathy.
Destitute of the light of philosophy and science, he had revolved in the
twilight of his ardent and struggling thoughts the causes of natural
phenomena, and settled these questions for himself by theories of his
own. Sometimes his residence for weeks had been a stranded hulk, cast on
one of these inhospitable shores, where he fasted and prayed, and
fancied that answering voices came to him in the moaning of the wind and
the sullen swell of the sea.
Our readers behold him now, stretched on the grass beside the hut of
Harry and Lisette, in one of his calmest and most communicative moods.
The children, with Lisette and the women, were searching for grapes in a
distant part of the inclosure; and Harry, with the other fugitive man,
had gone to bring in certain provisions which were to have been
deposited for them in a distant part of the swamp by some of their
confederates on one of the plantations. Old Tiff was hoeing potatoes
diligently in a spot not very far distant, and evidently listening to
the conversation with an ear of shrewd attention.
"Yes," said Dred, with that misty light in his eye which one may often
have remarked in the eye of enthusiasts, "the glory holds off, but it is
coming! Now is the groaning time! _That_ was revealed to me when I was
down at Okerecoke, when I slept three weeks in the hulk of a ship out of
which all souls had perished."
"Rather a dismal abode, my friend," said Clayton, by way of drawing him
on to conversation.
"The Spirit drove me there," said Dred, "for I had besought the Lord to
show unto me the knowledge of things to come; and the Lord bade me to go
from the habitations of men, and to seek out the desolate places of the
sea, and dwell in the wreck of a ship that was forsaken, for a sign of
desolation unto this people. So I went and dwelt there. And the Lord
called me Amraphal, because hidden things of judgment were made known
unto me. And the Lord showed unto me that even as a ship which is
forsaken of the waters, wherein all flesh have died, so shall it be with
the nation of the oppressor."
"How did the Lord show you this?" said Clayton, bent upon pursuing his
inquiry.
"Mine ear received it in the night season," said Dred, "and I heard how
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth, waiting for the adoption;
and because of this he hath appointed the tide."
"I don't see the connection," said Clayton. "Why because of this?"
"Because," said Dred, "every day is full of labor, but the labor goeth
back again into the seas. So that travail of all generations hath gone
back, till the desire of all nations shall come, and He shall come with
burning and with judgment, and with great shakings; but in the end
thereof shall be peace. Wherefore, it is written that in the new heavens
and the new earth there shall be no more sea."
These words were uttered with an air of solemn, assured confidence, that
impressed Clayton strangely. Something in his inner nature seemed to
recognize in them a shadow of things hoped for. He was in that mood into
which the mind of him who strives with the evils of this world must
often fall--a mood of weariness and longing; and heard within him the
cry of the human soul, tempest-tossed and not comforted, for rest and
assurance of the state where there shall be no more sea.
"So, then," he said unto Dred, "so, then, you believe that these heavens
and earth shall be made new."
"Assuredly," said Dred. "And the King shall reign in righteousness. He
shall deliver the needy when he crieth,--the poor and him that hath no
helper. He shall redeem their souls from deceit and violence. He shall
sit upon a white cloud, and the rainbow shall be round about his head.
And the elect of the Lord shall be kings and priests on the earth."
"And do you think you shall be one of them?" said Clayton.
Dred gave a kind of inward groan.
"Not every one that prophesieth in his name shall be found worthy!" he
said. "I have prayed the Lord, but He hath not granted me the assurance.
I am the rod of his wrath, to execute vengeance on his enemies. Shall
the axe magnify itself against him that lifteth it?"
The conversation was here interrupted by Harry, who, suddenly springing
from the tree, came up, in a hurried and agitated manner.
"The devil is broke loose!" he said. "Tom Gordon is out, with his whole
crew at his heels, beating the swamp! A more drunken, swearing,
ferocious set I never saw! They have got on to the trail of poor Jim,
and are tracking him without mercy!"
A dark light flashed from Dred's eye, as he sprang upon his feet.
"The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness; yea, the wilderness of
Kadesh. I will go forth and deliver him!"
He seized his rifle and shot-bag, and in a few moments was gone. It was
Harry's instinct to have followed him; but Lisette threw herself,
weeping, on his neck.
"Don't go--don't!" she said. "What shall we all do without you? Stay
with us! You'll certainly be killed, and you can do no good!"
"Consider," said Clayton, "that you have not the familiarity with these
swamps, nor the wonderful physical power of this man. It would only be
throwing away your life."
The hours of that day passed gloomily. Sometimes the brutal sound of
the hunt seemed to sweep near them,--the crack of rifles, the baying of
dogs, the sound of oaths,--and then again all went off into silence, and
nothing was heard but the innocent patter of leaf upon leaf, and the
warbling of the birds, singing cheerily, ignorant of the abyss of
cruelty and crime over which they sang.
Towards sunset a rustling was heard in the branches of the oak, and Dred
dropped down into the inclosure, wet, and soiled, and wearied. All
gathered round him, in a moment.
"Where is Jim?" asked Harry.
"Slain!" said Dred. "The archers pressed him sore and he hath fallen in
the wilderness!"
There was a general exclamation of horror. Dred made a movement to sit
down on the earth. He lost his balance, and fell; and they all saw now,
what at first they had not noticed, a wound in his breast, from which
the blood was welling. His wife fell by his side, with wild moans of
sorrow. He lifted his hand, and motioned her from him.
"Peace," he said, "peace! It is enough! Behold, I go unto the witnesses
who cry day and night!"
The circle stood around him in mute horror and surprise. Clayton was the
first who had presence of mind to kneel and stanch the blood. Dred
looked at him; his calm, large eyes filled with supernatural light.
"All over!" he said.
He put his hand calmly to his side, and felt the gushing blood. He took
some in his hand and threw it upward, crying out, with wild energy, in
the words of an ancient prophet,--
"Oh, earth, earth, earth! Cover thou not my blood!"
Behind the dark barrier of the woods the sun was setting gloriously.
Piles of loose, floating clouds, which all day long had been moving
through the sky in white and silvery stillness, now one after another
took up the rosy flush, and became each one a light-bearer, filled with
ethereal radiance. And the birds sang on as they ever sing, unterrified
by the great wail of human sorrow.
It was evident to the little circle that He who is mightier than the
kings of the earth was there, and that that splendid frame, which had
so long rejoiced in the exuberance of health and strength, was now to be
resolved again into the eternal elements.
"Harry," he said, "lay me beneath the heap of witness. Let the God of
their fathers judge between us!"