IV.
Slowly that sluggish sea of swoon gave up its dead, and life revived. How long he had lain in that blank trance, he knew not. He felt that he was lying on bare, damp ground, and that the moonlight was around him. The din had sunk into confused and broken noises, sounding and echoing distantly through the darker depths of the moonlit forest, and the air around him was desolate and still. A clear, cold, remote stillness filled his mind. Gradually a dim sense of the former terror, mixed with consciousness of all he had passed through, and of the place he was in, began to invade the silent vacancy, and crept upon him as from afar. Shuddering slightly, with icy thrills crawling through his torpid blood, he slowly raised himself to his knees, and looked around him. With a vague relief, which was almost pleasure, he saw that he was kneeling on dry ground—a low acclivity sloping from the morass, clothed with giant trees, and barred with large spaces of grey moonlight and sable shadow. Behind him was the tough cordage of a ground-vine, in which his foot was still entangled. Disengaging the limb without rising from his knees, he continued to gaze, gradually yielding to an overwhelming sense of awe, as he took in more fully the dark and dreadful magnificence of the forest which loomed before him, like the interior of some infernal cathedral. Far away, through immense irregular vistas, diminishing in interminable perspective, the ground stretched in vast mosaics of sable and silver, bunched and ridged with low flowers and herbage and running vines, all moveless and colorless in the rich pallor of the moonlight, and in the solemn shadow, as though wrought in stone. Upborne on the enormous clustered columns of the trees, every trunk rising sheer like a massive shaft of rough ebony, darkly shining, and fretted and starred with the gleaming leaves and flowers of parasitical vines—masses of gloomy frondage, touched here and there with sullen glory, spread aloft and interwove like the groined concave of some tremendous gothic roof, while from the leaf-embossed and splendor-dappled arches, the long mosses drooped heavily, like black innumerable banners, above the giant aisles. The air was dank and chill, and laden with thick and stagnant odors from the night-blowing flowers. Fire-flies flitted and glimmered with crimson and emerald flames; fen-lights flickered and quivered bluely down the arcades in the morass; and all around from the bordering quagmire, and from the crypts and vaults of the shadows, the demon-voices of the region, sounding from above and below, and rapidly swelling into full choir, chanted in discordant chorus. Listening to their subterranean and aërial stridor, which rose in wild accordance with the ghastly pomp, the horrible and sombre grandeur of the scene, a dark imagination might have dreamed that some hellish mass in celebration of the monstrous crime against mankind which centered in this region, was pealing through the vaulted aisles and arches of a church whose bishop was the enemy of human souls. Here, to this dread cathedral, might gather in his wide and wicked diocese—the millions callous to the woes and wrongs of slaves—the myriads careless of all ills their fellows suffer, while their own selfish strivings prosper, and wealth and sensual comforts thrive around them. Peopling the vast and drear nocturnal solitudes, under the moonlit arches, here they might come, while the screaming, hooting, bellowing chant resounded, and kneel, a motley and innumerable concourse of base powers, in fell communion. Statesmen who hold the great object of government to be the protection of property in man, and wield the mighty engine of the state for the oppression of the weak; placemen who suck on office, deaf and blind to the interests of the poor; scurvy politicians, intent on pelf and power, who plot and scheme for tyranny, and legislate away the inalienable rights of men; Jesuit jurists, mocking at natural law, who decree that black men have no rights that white men are bound to respect; scholars, bastard to the blood of the learned and the brave, who prate with learned ignorance of manifest destiny and inferior races, to justify against all human instincts the cruel practice of the oppressor; hide-bound priests, who would turn the hunted fugitive from their doors, or consent that their brothers should go into slavery to save the Union; traders and slavers, an innumerable throng, mad-ravening with never-sated avarice, and furious against liberty and justice as lesseners of their gains; these, and their rabblement of catch-poles, and jail-birds, and kidnappers, and men-hunters, and slave-law commissioners—here they might assemble to pray that their conspiracy against mankind might prosper, and love and reverence for the soul die down in darkness, and man degrade into the brute and fiend. Fit place and time, and fit surroundings for such rites as these; fitter far than for the trembling murmurs of a solitary slave, kneeling in the dreary moonlight, and pouring out the forlorn agony of his spirit in prayer to the God of the poor.
Some dim association of the aspect of the forest with the cathedrals he had seen many years before when he was a slave in New Orleans; some dim sense that he was on his knees in the attitude of supplication, had mixed with the overwhelming consciousness of his helplessness, his wretchedness, and his danger, and impelled him to pray. Fervently, in uncouth words and broken tones, he poured forth the mournful and despairing litany of a soul haunted with horror, encompassed with perils, and yearning for deliverance. The demoniac clamor of the forest rose louder and louder as he went on, breaking his communion with God, till at length, appalled by the unhallowed din, he ceased, and rising to his feet, uncomforted and terrified, staggered weakly on his way.
He was very feeble now, and his strength was so nearly gone that he tottered. His setting forward again was a mere mechanical action, but it continued for some minutes before the dull thought came to him that his movement was useless. In his agonizing desire for sleep, he tried to climb a tree, where, lodged in a fork of the branches, he thought he would be safer and more comfortable than on the ground; but even with the advantage of the parasitical vine which covered its trunk, his strength was not equal to the effort. He was in the last stages of exhaustion.
Sitting upon the ground, he resolved to keep awake till morning, when there would be less danger of wild beasts, and he might dare to repose. He sat for a long time shuddering with cold, and watching intently all about him, lest some panther should spring upon him unawares. Once or twice, with a start of terror, he caught himself nodding; and at length, affrighted at the possible consequences of his dropping off into slumber, he strove to occupy his mind by observing minutely the various details of the scene before him. He had been busy at this for some time, when he became suddenly and quietly perplexed with the feeling that there was something he ought to take notice of, but was unable to remember or define what it was. All the while he was vacantly gazing at the hole of a gigantic cypress rising from a dense clump of dwarf palmettoes, slightly silvered by a faint ray of moonlight, and from time to time he saw, without receiving any impression therefrom, a dim vapor glide athwart the palmetto leaves. Suddenly but quietly it came to him that what he ought to have noticed was a peculiar odor, and startled a little, he strove to shake the torpor from his mind, and think. What could it be? As suddenly and quietly as before it came to him, and at the same moment his eye took in the meaning of that curious mist gliding over the palmettoes. It was the smell of smoke, and yonder was its source. Thoroughly roused now, and vaguely alarmed, he scrambled up on his feet, with a little strength returning to his body, and gazed in stupefaction at the misty ringlets lazily stealing across the leaves. It certainly was smoke; he smelled now very distinctly the dry scent of burning wood. Who could have a fire in the heart of the swamp at this time of night? At first, superstitious fancies rose in his mind, for the thought that any person could be here with him was inconceivable. But gradually recovering self-possession, he resolved, for he was naturally courageous, to go forward and solve the mystery; and taking the knife from the back of his neck, he cautiously approached the palmettoes, his blood thrilling, and his heart beating, and all the forest resonant around him. Peering through the leaves, he saw with amazement a pile of smouldering embers duskily glimmering in front of a large hole in the trunk. The tree was hollow. A sort of fright fell upon him, and he retreated; but recovering instantly, he again advanced, and nerved to desperation, spoke in a voice faint both from weakness and trepidation:
“Ho, there! Ho, you in there! You there, whoever you are!”
There was no answer, nor movement, but at the sound of his voice, a tremendous uproar burst forth again in the forest. Desperate at this, he again spoke in a louder tone:
“Ho, now, you in there! You just say who you are. I’m coming in now!”
No answer, but the uproar in the branches and from the swamp increased like a tempest. Strung up now to his highest pitch, Antony clutched his knife, and setting his teeth hard, plunged in through the hole.
It was densely dark within. The immense cypress was completely hollow, as he could feel, for stretching out his arms he encountered nothing. He began to grope about, but stopped suddenly, thinking it better to get a light. Quite overcome by the strangeness of his discovery, and by the novel circumstance of a fire being found smouldering before an empty tree, he stooped down through the low entrance to the brands, and blowing upon one till it flamed, withdrew himself again into the tree, and looked around. Suddenly, with a hoarse gasp of horror, he tottered back, falling from his squatting posture over upon the ground, and dropping the brand, which at once went out, leaving him in utter darkness. In that instant he had caught a glimpse, by the fitful flame, of a lank figure, duskily clothed, lying on its back, with a mop of thick white hair, a leathern face hideously grinning, and glassy eyes which had met his; and he felt like one who had entered the lair of a fiend.
So paralyzed was he with affright, that instead of scrambling out of the tree, he sat motionless, leaning back on his hands, with his blood curdling, and cold thrills crawling under his hair. A wild fancy that he would be instantly sprung upon by this thing, held him still and breathless. But all remained silent and moveless, and at last, venturing to stir, he got up on one knee, and pressed his hands on his heart to stop its mad beating. By degrees his courage came back to him, or, at least, his dreadful fear became blended with desperation. Then came wild wonder at the horrible strangeness of that figure, and slowly this melted into a savage and frenzied curiosity. Seizing the smoking brand from the earth, he backed out through the hole (for he absolutely did not dare to turn his back to the dread tenant of the cavern), and, once outside, blew upon the stick till it reflamed. Waiting a moment till the light burned strongly, he thrust it through the hole, and holding it above his head, glared with starting eyes upon the face of the figure.
He saw in a moment that it was nothing unearthly—only the form of an aged woman, and of his own race. Instantly it struck him that she was a fugitive, probably a dweller in the swamp. Reëntering the tree, he approached and held the blazing brand over her countenance. With a terrible sensation of awe he saw that it was the countenance of the dead. She lay on a couch of the forest moss, her gaunt figure decently composed, with the hands crossed, as if she had known that she was dying. She was apparently very old; the woolly hair was white; the black face was deeply wrinkled, and much emaciated; the mouth was open, and had fallen back, showing the white teeth, which were perfectly sound as in her youth; and the glassy eyes were unclosed and fixed aslant with that look which had so terrified the fugitive. He felt no terror now, however, only awe; for with the discovery of the truth, the hideousness of the face was gone. Bending down, he touched the cheek. It was still tepid—almost warm; the life had not been long extinct, a fact of which the smouldering brands of the fire she had kindled was another evidence. Poring upon the features, a confused feeling gathered in his mind that he had seen them before, and he strove to resolve it into certainty. Suddenly, as the flickering of the burning brand he held brought out a new expression on the dark, withered lineaments, it flashed upon him that this was old Nancy. She had been a slave on Mellott’s plantation, near Lafitte’s, and had disappeared five or six years before, after a terrible whipping. They had hunted the swamp for her without avail, and it was supposed that she had perished. Here she had lived, however, and here she was now, all her earthly troubles over.
Turning away from the body in wild wonderment, the fugitive looked around him. The space within the tree must have been at least six feet in diameter. It had been hollowed out by time in the form of an upright cone, the apex of which was at least a dozen feet above the ground. The hole had probably been eaten out by a sort of dry rot, or perhaps by insects, for the wooden walls were not damp, nor was the corrugated floor. The only furniture was the couch of Spanish moss on which the body lay, a block of wood fashioned for a seat out of the butt end of a log, and a long paddle, bladed at both ends, which leaned upright against the wall. Looking around further, Antony noticed some little niches cut in the walls, with the handle of a hatchet sticking out of one of them. On the blade was a parcel wrapped in cotton cloth, in which he found three or four corn-cob pipes, a bundle of dried tobacco-leaf, bunches of matches, and two or three knick-knacks of no great use. Evidently Nancy had made occasional excursions from her hiding-place, for these things must all have been borrowed from the race of the taskmasters. This was still more evident as Antony pursued his observations. In another niche, he found at least half a peck of corn done up in a cloth, and in a wooden quart measure there was some more, parched. His hunger rose so suddenly and fiercely at sight of the food that he at once crammed a handful of the parched corn into his mouth, and with the measure in his hand, continued to crunch, although his throat was so swollen with his long fast that he could scarcely swallow. Continuing his search while he ate, he found in a third niche an oblong tin pan and a gourd, but in the pan, to his astonishment and delight, there was a dead opossum and a small fish. They were both fresh—Nancy must have captured them that very day. She had lived a woodman’s life in the heart of the morass, setting her fishtraps on the bayou, and catching the smaller animals in the forest. Forgetting to pursue his search further in the desire to appease his ravening hunger, Antony only paused to lay one of the pieces of cotton cloth over the face of the dead, and then set to work to rake the fire into a bed of coals, and hastily dressing the meat with his bowie-knife, broiled it, and ate with the eager voracity of a man half starved.
A mad repast, not given to appetite, but famine, and void of all enjoyment. Not himself, but his hunger as a thing apart from himself, was fed by those gross gobbets. Kneeling before the embers, in the dusky glimmer, he hurried down the half-cooked food, tasting of smoke and cinders, as to some wild wolf that gnawed his vitals. In the darkness behind him lay the swart corpse, and the thought of it was a quiet horror in his mind. Blent with that horror, and with his raging famine, was a dull, stupefied sense of the chafe of the collar on his neck, the swollen pains and weakness of his limbs, the steady suck of the sleeplessness in his jaded brain, the tepid clinging of his wet clothes, the filthy smell of the muck and slime that covered him, and all was mixed confusedly with a dimmer apprehension of the smoky warmth of the cavern, the sullen smoulder of the embers, and the resonance of the vast drear forest.
His meal ended, he still knelt in the murk contraction of all his sensations and apprehensions, before the dull fire. The fierce gnawing at his stomach had changed to an uneasy distention, as if something huge and bloated lay dead within him. His horror of the corpse had grown stronger even than the heavy weariness and frowsy misery of body and spirit, and he now begun to consider what he should do with it. It ought to be buried, he felt, but in his utter torpor of fatigue, he shrunk from the labor of making it a grave.
Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the hatchet, chopping out a burial-place in an oblong space near the tree between the palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil with his hands. It was a long and painful task for his weak and sore body; but at length it was ended, and bringing out the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth over it, and left it to its rest.
The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises when he entered the cypress hollow again. He heard them dully, with torpid indifference. The tree seemed strangely empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the block, watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he arranged the embers so that they would outlast the night to keep away the wild beasts; and then throwing himself upon the heap of moss where the corpse had lain, he sank away in a dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the screaming and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon.