Clark did not answer this insolent speech, but gravely took up the oars and pushed off.
They were half-way across the river when Mary began to recover animation. Edward laid down his oar, and taking her hand in his was about to speak, but she drew it away with a faint shudder, and burying her face in her sister’s bosom remained still and silent as before.
CHAPTER V
THE TEMPTER AND THE TEMPEST
Tahmeroo, the Indian girl, was sitting under the pine as Mary Derwent had left her. With the coral but half twisted in her hair, she had paused in her graceful task, and sinking gently back to the bank of moss which formed her seat reclined on one elbow, with her long tresses unbraided and floating in wavy masses over her person. She was yielding to the repose of a soft and dreamy reverie—new and very sweet to her wild, young heart—when the sound of voices and the dash of an oar aroused her. She started to her feet and listened. The fire flashed back to those large dark eyes but late so pleasant and soft in their expression, and a rich crimson rushed to her cheek. The voices ceased for a moment; then were renewed, and the rapid beat of the paddle became still more audible.
Tahmeroo sprang forward and ran up to a point of the hill which commanded a view of the river. The little canoe, with its band of red paint, was making from the shore, and in it sat Jane Derwent, with the head of the deformed girl resting in her lap. The back of the oarsman was towards the shore; his head was bent, and the eyes, the beautiful eyes of Jane Derwent were fixed on him with an expression which Tahmeroo’s heart, unlearned as it was, taught her to understand. A storm of surprise, anger and fear rushed through the heart of the young Indian. The oarsman turned his head, and the face was revealed. Then a smile, vivid and bright as a burst of sunshine after a tempest, broke over her features.
Tahmeroo breathed deeply and turned away. It seemed as if an arrow had been withdrawn from her heart by the sight of that face. She hurried down the hill towards a clump of black alders that overhung the river’s brink and unmoored a light canoe hitherto concealed beneath the dark foliage. Placing herself in the bottom, she gave two or three vigorous strokes with the paddle, and shot like a bird up the stream.
As Tahmeroo proceeded up the river the scenery, till then half-pastoral, half-sublime, became more savage and gloomy in its aspect. Huge rocks shot up against the sky in picturesque grandeur; the foliage which clothed them grew dusky in the waning light and fell back to the ravines in dark, heavy shadows. A gloom hung about the towering precipices, and the thick masses of vegetation, like funeral drapery, swathing the pillars and wild arches of a monastic ruin. It was the darkness of a gathering tempest. There was something sublime and almost awful in the gradual and silent mustering of the elements.
Tahmeroo rested for a moment as she entered the rocky jaws of the mountain, and as her frail bark rocked to the current of wind which swept down the gorge she looked around with a feeling of hushed terror. A mountain, cleft in twain to the foundation, towered to the sky on either hand—bold, bleak and sombre. Through the rent, down hundreds of feet from the summit, crept the deep river stealthily and slow, like a huge serpent winding himself around the bulwark of a stronghold. The darkness of the forests was so dense, and the clouds so heavy, that there was nothing to distinguish the outline of the murky waters from the majestic ramparts through which they glided. All was wild, solemn and gloomy.
As the Indian girl looked upward the clouds swept back for a moment and the last rays of sunset fell with a glaring light on the bold summit of the mountain, rendering by contrast the depths of the chasm more dreary in its intense shadow.
The threatened storm had seemingly passed over, and a few stars trembled in the depths of the sky when she moored her canoe in a little inlet, washed up into the mouth of a narrow ravine which opened on the river’s brink.