Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860

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Immediately the long red tongue was thrust forth again. Before it
touched, a song sprang to her lips, a wild sea-song, such as some
sailor might be singing far out on trackless blue water that night, the
shrouds whistling with frost and the sheets glued in ice,--a song with
the wind in its burden and the spray in its chorus. The monster raised
his head and flared the fiery eyeballs upon her, then fretted the
imprisoned claws a moment and was quiet; only the breath like the vapor
from some hell-pit still swathed her. Her voice, at first faint and
fearful, gradually lost its quaver, grew under her control and subject
to her modulation; it rose on long swells, it fell in subtile cadences,
now and then its tones pealed out like bells from distant belfries on
fresh sonorous mornings. She sung the song through, and, wondering lest
his name of Indian Devil were not his true name, and if he would not
detect her, she repeated it. Once or twice now, indeed, the beast
stirred uneasily, turned, and made the bough sway at his movement. As
she ended, he snapped his jaws together, and tore away the fettered
member, curling it under him with a snarl,--when she burst into the
gayest reel that ever answered a fiddle-bow. How many a time she had
heard her husband play it on the homely fiddle made by himself from
birch and cherry-wood! how many a time she had seen it danced on the
floor of their one room, to the patter of wooden clogs and the rustle
of homespun petticoat! how many a time she had danced it herself!--and
did she not remember once, as they joined clasps for right-hands-round,
how it had lent its gay, bright measure to her life? And here she was
singing it alone, in the forest, at midnight, to a wild beast! As she
sent her voice trilling up and down its quick oscillations between joy
and pain, the creature who grasped her uncurled his paw and scratched
the bark from the bough; she must vary the spell; and her voice spun
leaping along the projecting points of tune of a hornpipe. Still
singing, she felt herself twisted about with a low growl and a lifting
of the red lip from the glittering teeth; she broke the hornpipe's
thread, and commenced unravelling a lighter, livelier thing, an Irish
jig. Up and down and round about her voice flew, the beast threw back
his head so that the diabolical face fronted hers, and the torrent of
his breath prepared her for his feast as the anaconda slimes his prey.
Franticly she darted from tune to tune; his restless movements followed
her. She tired herself with dancing and vivid national airs, growing
feverish and singing spasmodically as she felt her horrid tomb yawning
wider. Touching in this manner all the slogan and keen clan cries, the
beast moved again, but only to lay the disengaged paw across her with
heavy satisfaction. She did not dare to pause; through the clear cold
air, the frosty starlight, she sang. If there were yet any tremor in
the tone, it was not fear,--she had learned the secret of sound at
last; nor could it be chill,--far too high a fervor throbbed her
pulses; it was nothing but the thought of the log-house and of what
might be passing within it. She fancied the baby stirring in his sleep
and moving his pretty lips,--her husband rising and opening the door,
looking out after her, and wondering at her absence. She fancied the
light pouring through the chink and then shut in again with all the
safety and comfort and joy, her husband taking down the fiddle and
playing lightly with his head inclined, playing while she sang, while
she sang for her life to an Indian Devil. Then she knew he was fumbling
for and finding some shining fragment and scoring it down the yellowing
hair, and unconsciously her voice forsook the wild war-tunes and
drifted into the half-gay, half-melancholy Rosin the Bow.

Suddenly she woke pierced with a pang, and the daggered tooth
penetrating her flesh;--dreaming of safety, she had ceased singing and
lost it. The beast had regained the use of all his limbs, and now,
standing and raising his back, bristling and foaming, with sounds that
would have been like hisses but for their deep and fearful sonority, he
withdrew step by step toward the trunk of the tree, still with his
flaming balls upon her. She was all at once free, on one end of the
bough, twenty feet from the ground. She did not measure the distance,
but rose to drop herself down, careless of any death, so that it were
not this. Instantly, as if he scanned her thoughts, the creature
bounded forward with a yell and caught her again in his dreadful hold.
It might be that he was not greatly famished; for, as she suddenly
flung up her voice again, he settled himself composedly on the bough,
still clasping her with invincible pressure to his rough, ravenous
breast, and listening in a fascination to the sad, strange U-la-lu that
now moaned forth in loud, hollow tones above him. He half closed his
eyes, and sleepily reopened and shut them again.

What rending pains were close at hand! Death! and what a death! worse
than any other that is to be named! Water, be it cold or warm, that
which buoys up blue ice-fields, or which bathes tropical coasts with
currents of balmy bliss, is yet a gentle conqueror, kisses as it kills,
and draws you down gently through darkening fathoms to its heart. Death
at the sword is the festival of trumpet and bugle and banner, with
glory ringing out around you and distant hearts thrilling through
yours. No gnawing disease can bring such hideous end as this; for that
is a fiend bred of your own flesh, and this--is it a fiend, this living
lump of appetites? What dread comes with the thought of perishing in
flames! but fire, let it leap and hiss never so hotly, is something too
remote, too alien, to inspire us with such loathly horror as a wild
beast; if it have a life, that life is too utterly beyond our
comprehension. Fire is not half ourselves; as it devours, arouses
neither hatred nor disgust; is not to be known by the strength of our
lower natures let loose; does not drip our blood into our faces from
foaming chaps, nor mouth nor snarl above us with vitality. Let us be
ended by fire, and we are ashes, for the winds to bear, the leaves to
cover; let us be ended by wild beasts, and the base, cursed thing howls
with us forever through the forest. All this she felt as she charmed
him, and what force it lent to her song God knows. If her voice should
fail! If the damp and cold should give her any fatal hoarseness! If all
the silent powers of the forest did not conspire to help her! The dark,
hollow night rose indifferently over her; the wide, cold air breathed
rudely past her, lifted her wet hair and blew it down again; the great
boughs swung with a ponderous strength, now and then clashed their iron
lengths together and shook off a sparkle of icy spears or some
long-lain weight of snow from their heavy shadows. The green depths
were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful haunts that all
the summer were hers and rejoiced to share with her their bounty, these
heavens that had yielded their largess, these stems that had thrust
their blossoms into her hands, all these friends of three moons ago
forgot her now and knew her no longer.

Feeling her desolation, wild, melancholy, forsaken songs rose thereon
from that frightful aerie,--weeping, wailing tunes, that sob among the
people from age to age, and overflow with otherwise unexpressed
sadness,--all rude, mournful ballads,--old tearful strains, that
Shakspeare heard the vagrants sing, and that rise and fall like the
wind and tide,--sailor-songs, to be heard only in lone mid-watches
beneath the moon and stars,--ghastly rhyming romances, such as that
famous one of the "Lady Margaret," when

"She slipped on her gown of green
A piece below the knee,--
And 'twas all a long, cold winter's night
A dead corse followed she."

Still the beast lay with closed eyes, yet never relaxing his grasp.
Once a half-whine of enjoyment escaped him,--he fawned his fearful head
upon her; once he scored her cheek with his tongue: savage caresses
that hurt like wounds. How weary she was! and yet how terribly awake!
How fuller and fuller of dismay grew the knowledge that she was only
prolonging her anguish and playing with death! How appalling the
thought that with her voice ceased her existence! Yet she could not
sing forever; her throat was dry and hard; her very breath was a pain;
her mouth was hotter than any desert-worn pilgrim's;--if she could but
drop upon her burning tongue one atom of the ice that glittered about
her!--but both of her arms were pinioned in the giant's vice. She
remembered the winding-sheet, and for the first time in her life
shivered with spiritual fear. Was it hers? She asked herself, as she
sang, what sins she had committed, what life she had led, to find her
punishment so soon and in these pangs,--and then she sought eagerly for
some reason why her husband was not up and abroad to find her. He
failed her,--her one sole hope in life; and without being aware of it,
her voice forsook the songs of suffering and sorrow for old Covenanting
hymns,--hymns with which her mother had lulled her, which the
class-leader pitched in the chimney-corners,--grand and sweet Methodist
hymns, brimming with melody and with all fantastic involutions of tune
to suit that ecstatic worship,--hymns full of the beauty of holiness,
steadfast, relying, sanctified by the salvation they had lent to those
in worse extremity than hers,--for they had found themselves in the
grasp of hell, while she was but in the jaws of death. Out of this
strange music, peculiar to one character of faith, and than which there
is none more beautiful in its degree nor owning a more potent sway of
sound, her voice soared into the glorified chants of churches. What to
her was death by cold or famine or wild beasts? "Though He slay me, yet
will I trust in Him," she sang. High and clear through the frore fair
night, the level moonbeams splintering in the wood, the scarce glints
of stars in the shadowy roof of branches, these sacred anthems
rose,--rose as a hope from despair, as some snowy spray of flower-bells
from blackest mould. Was she not in God's hands? Did not the world
swing at His will? If this were in His great plan of providence, was it
not best, and should she not accept it?

"He is the Lord our God; His judgments are in all the earth."

Oh, sublime faith of our fathers, where utter self-sacrifice alone was
true love, the fragrance of whose unrequired subjection was pleasant as
that of golden censers swung in purple-vapored chancels!

Never ceasing in the rhythm of her thoughts, articulated in music as
they thronged, the memory of her first communion flashed over her.
Again she was in that distant place on that sweet spring morning. Again
the congregation rustled out, and the few remained, and she trembled to
find herself among them.

How well she remembered the devout, quiet faces; too accustomed to the
sacred feast to glow with their inner joy! how well the snowy linen at
the altar, the silver vessels slowly and silently shifting! and as the
cup approached and passed, how the sense of delicious perfume stole in
and heightened the transport of her prayer, and she had seemed, looking
up through the windows where the sky soared blue in constant freshness,
to feel all heaven's balms dripping from the portals, and to scent the
lilies of eternal peace! Perhaps another would not have felt so much
ecstasy as satisfaction on that occasion; but it is a true, if a later
disciple, who has said, "The Lord bestoweth his blessings there, where
he findeth the vessels empty."--"And does it need the walls of a church
to renew my communion?" she asked. "Does not every moment stand a
temple four-square to God? And in that morning, with its buoyant
sunlight, was I any dearer to the Heart of the World than now?" "My
beloved is mine, and I am his," she sang over and over again, with all
varied inflection and profuse tune. How gently all the winter-wrapt
things bent toward her then! into what relation with her had they
grown! how this common dependence was the spell of their intimacy! how
at one with Nature had she become! how all the night and the silence
and the forest seemed to hold its breath, and to send its soul up to
God in her singing! It was no longer despondency, that singing. It was
neither prayer nor petition. She had left imploring, "How long wilt
thou forget me, O Lord?" "Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of
death!" "For in death there is no remembrance of thee";--with countless
other such fragments of supplication. She cried rather, "Yea, though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me";--and
lingered, and repeated, and sang again, "I shall be satisfied, when I
awake, with thy likeness."

Then she thought of the Great Deliverance, when he drew her up out of
many waters, and the flashing old psalm pealed forth triumphantly:--

"The Lord descended from above,
and bow'd the heavens hie;
And underneath his feet he cast
the darknesse of the skie.
On cherubs and on cherubins
full royally he road:
And on the wings of all the winds
came flying all abroad."

She forgot how recently, and with what a strange pity for her own
shapeless form that was to be, she had quaintly sung,--

"Oh, lovely appearance of death!
What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare!"

She remembered instead,--"In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy
right hand there are pleasures forevermore"; and, "God will redeem my
soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me"; "He will
swallow up death in victory." Not once now did she say, "Lord, how long
wilt thou look on? rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling
from the lions"--for she knew that "the young lions roar after their
prey and seek their meat from God." "O Lord, thou preservest man and
beast!" she said.

She had no comfort or consolation in this season, such as sustained the
Christian martyrs in the amphitheatre. She was not dying for her faith;
there were no palms in heaven for her to wave; but how many a time had
she declared,--"I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,
than to dwell in the tents of wickedness!" And as the broad rays here
and there broke through the dense covert of shade and lay in rivers of
lustre on crystal sheathing and frozen fretting of trunk and limb and
on the great spaces of refraction, they builded up visibly that house,
the shining city on the hill, and singing, "Beautiful for situation,
the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, on the sides of the North,
the city of the Great King," her vision climbed to that higher picture
where the angel shows the dazzling thing, the holy Jerusalem descending
out of heaven from God, with its splendid battlements and gates of
pearls, and its foundations, the eleventh a jacinth, the twelfth an
amethyst,--with its great white throne, and the rainbow round about it,
in sight like unto an emerald:--"And there shall be no night
there,--for the Lord God giveth them light," she sang.

What whisper of dawn now rustled through the wilderness? How the night
was passing! And still the beast crouched upon the bough, changing only
the posture of his head, that again he might command her with those
charmed eyes;--half their fire was gone; she could almost have released
herself from his custody; yet, had she stirred, no one knows what
malevolent instinct might have dominated anew. But of that she did not
dream; long ago stripped of any expectation, she was experiencing in
her divine rapture how mystically true it is that "he that dwelleth in
the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the
Almighty."

Slow clarion cries now wound from the distance as the cocks caught the
intelligence of day and reechoed it faintly from farm to farm,--sleepy
sentinels of night, sounding the foe's invasion, and translating that
dim intuition to ringing notes of warning. Still she chanted on. A
remote crash of brushwood told of some other beast on his depredations,
or some night-belated traveller groping his way through the narrow
path. Still she chanted on. The far, faint echoes of the chanticleers
died into distance,--the crashing of the branches grew nearer. No wild
beast that, but a man's step,--a man's form in the moonlight, stalwart
and strong,--on one arm slept a little child, in the other hand he held
his gun. Still she chanted on.

Perhaps, when her husband last looked forth, he was half ashamed to
find what a fear he felt for her. He knew she would never leave the
child so long but for some direst need,--and yet he may have laughed at
himself, as he lifted and wrapped it with awkward care, and, loading
his gun and strapping on his horn, opened the door again and closed it
behind him, going out and plunging into the darkness and dangers of the
forest. He was more singularly alarmed than he would have been willing
to acknowledge; as he had sat with his bow hovering over the strings,
he had half believed to hear her voice mingling gayly with the
instrument, till he paused and listened if she were not about to lift
the latch and enter. As he drew nearer the heart of the forest, that
intimation of melody seemed to grow more actual, to take body and
breath, to come and go on long swells and ebbs of the night-breeze, to
increase with tune and words, till a strange, shrill singing grew ever
clearer, and, as he stepped into an open space of moonbeams, far up in
the branches, rocked by the wind, and singing, "How beautiful upon the
mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that
publisheth peace," he saw his wife,--his wife,--but, great God in
heaven! how? Some mad exclamation escaped him, but without diverting
her. The child knew the singing voice, though never heard before in
that unearthly key, and turned toward it through the veiling dreams.
With a celerity almost instantaneous, it lay, in the twinkling of an
eye, on the ground at the father's feet, while his gun was raised to
his shoulder and levelled at the monster covering his wife with shaggy
form and flaming gaze,--his wife so ghastly white, so rigid, so stained
with blood, her eyes so fixedly bent above, and her lips, that had
indurated into the chiselled pallor of marble, parted only with that
flood of solemn song.

I do not know if it were the mother-instinct that for a moment lowered
her eyes,--those eyes, so lately riveted on heaven, now suddenly seeing
all life-long bliss possible. A thrill of joy pierced and shivered
through her like a weapon, her voice trembled in its course, her glance
lost its steady strength, fever-flushes chased each other over her
face, yet she never once ceased chanting. She was quite aware, that, if
her husband shot now, the ball must pierce her body before reaching any
vital part of the beast,--and yet better that death, by his hand, than
the other. But this her husband also knew, and he remained motionless,
just covering the creature with the sight. He dared not fire, lest some
wound not mortal should break the spell exercised by her voice, and the
beast, enraged with pain, should rend her in atoms; moreover, the light
was too uncertain for his aim. So he waited. Now and then he examined
his gun to see if the damp were injuring its charge, now and then he
wiped the great drops from his forehead. Again the cocks crowed with
the passing hour,--the last time they were heard on that night.
Cheerful home sound then, how full of safety and all comfort and rest
it seemed! what sweet morning incidents of sparkling fire and sunshine,
of gay household bustle, shining dresser, and cooing baby, of steaming
cattle in the yard, and brimming milk-pails at the door! what pleasant
voices! what laughter! what security! and here----

Now, as she sang on in the slow, endless, infinite moments, the fervent
vision of God's peace was gone. Just as the grave had lost its sting,
she was snatched back again into the arms of earthly hope. In vain she
tried to sing, "There remaineth a rest for the people of God,"--her
eyes trembled on her husband's, and she could think only of him, and of
the child, and of happiness that yet might be, but with what a dreadful
gulf of doubt between! She shuddered now in the suspense; all calm
forsook her; she was tortured with dissolving heats or frozen with icy
blasts; her face contracted, growing small and pinched; her voice was
hoarse and sharp,--every tone cut like a knife,--the notes became heavy
to lift,--withheld by some hostile pressure,--impossible. One gasp, a
convulsive effort, and there was silence,--she had lost her voice.

The beast made a sluggish movement,--stretched and fawned like one
awaking,--then, as if he would have yet more of the enchantment,
stirred her slightly with his muzzle. As he did so, a sidelong hint of
the man standing below with the raised gun smote him; he sprung round
furiously, and, seizing his prey, was about to leap into some unknown
airy den of the topmost branches now waving to the slow dawn. The late
moon had rounded through the sky so that her gleam at last fell full
upon the bough with fairy frosting; the wintry morning light did not
yet penetrate the gloom. The woman, suspended in mid-air an instant,
cast only one agonized glance beneath,--but across and through it, ere
the lids could fall, shot a withering sheet of flame,--a rifle-crack,
half heard, was lost in the terrible yell of desperation that bounded
after it and filled her ears with savage echoes, and in the wide arc of
some eternal descent she was falling;--but the beast fell under her. I
think that the moment following must have been too sacred for us, and
perhaps the three have no special interest again till they issue from
the shadows of the wilderness upon the white hills that skirt their
home. The father carries the child hushed again into slumber; the
mother follows with no such feeble step as might be anticipated,--and
as they slowly climb the steep under the clear gray sky and the paling
morning star, she stops to gather a spray of the red-rose berries or a
feathery tuft of dead grasses for the chimney-piece of the log-house,
or a handful of brown ones for the child's play,--and of these quiet,
happy folk you would scarcely dream how lately they had stolen from
under the banner and encampment of the great King Death. The husband
proceeds a step or two in advance; the wife lingers over a singular
foot-print in the snow, stoops and examines it, then looks up with a
hurried word. Her husband stands alone on the hill, his arms folded
across the babe, his gun fallen,--stands defined against the pallid sky
like a bronze. What is there in their home, lying below and yellowing
in the light, to fix him with such a stare? She springs to his side.
There is no home there. The log-house, the barns, the neighboring
farms, the fences, are all blotted out and mingled in one smoking ruin.
Desolation and death were indeed there, and beneficence and life in the
forest. Tomahawk and scalping-knife, descending during that night, had
left behind them only this work of their accomplished hatred and one
subtle foot-print in the snow.

For the rest,--the world was all before them, where to choose.

* * * * *

URANIA.

Hast thou forgotten whose thou art?
To what high service consecrate?
I gave thee not a noble heart
To wed with such ignoble fate.

I found thee where the laurels grow
Around the lonely Delphian shrine;
There, where the sacred fountains flow,
I found thee, and I made thee mine.

I gave thy soul to agony,
And strange unsatisfied desire,
That thou mightst dearer be to me,
And worthier of thy burning lyre.

O child, thy fate had made thee God,
To thee such powers divine were given;
The paths of fire thou mightst have trod
Had led thee to the stars of heaven.

And those who in the early dawn
Of beauty sat and sang of day,
Deep in their twilight shades withdrawn,
Had heard thy coming far away,--

With haunting music sweet and strange,
And airs ambrosial blown before,
Vague breathings of the floral change
That glorifies the hills of yore:

Had felt the joy those only find
Who in their secret souls have known
The mystery of the poet mind
That through all beauty feels its own:

Had felt the God within them rise
To meet thy radiant soul divine;
Had searched with their prophetic eyes
The midnight luminous of thine.

So fondly did Urania deem!
So proudly did she prophesy!
Oh, ruin of a noble dream
She thought too glorious to die!

Nor knew thy passionate songs of yore
Were as a promise unfulfilled,--
A stately portal set before
The palace thou shall never build!

For is it come to this, at last?
And thou forever must remain
A godlike statue, formed and cast
In marble attitude of pain,--

Proud lips that in their scorn are mute,
And haunting eyes of anguished love,
One hand that grasps a silent lute,
And one convulsed hand above

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