“Ye scent the coming battle?” said the arch-tymbestere.
“Ay, ay, ay!” answered the sisterhood.
“But we have gone miles since noon,—I am faint and weary!” said one amongst them.
Red Grisell, the youngest of the band, struck her comrade on the cheek—“Faint and weary, ronion, with blood and booty in the wind!”
The tymbesteres smiled grimly on their young sister; but the leader whispered “Hush!” and they stood for a second or two with outstretched throats, with dilated nostrils, with pent breath, listening to the clarion and the hoofs and the rattling armour, the human vultures foretasting their feast of carnage; then, obedient to a sign from their chieftainess, they crept lightly and rapidly into the mouth of a neighbouring alley, where they cowered by the squalid huts, concealed. The troop passed on,—a gallant and serried band, horse and foot, about fifteen hundred men. As they filed up the thoroughfare, and the tramp of the last soldiers fell hollow on the starlit ground, the tymbesteres stole from their retreat, and, at the distance of some few hundred yards, followed the procession, with long, silent, stealthy strides,—as the meaner beasts, in the instinct of hungry cunning, follow the lion for the garbage of his prey.
CHAPTER V. THE FUGITIVES ARE CAPTURED—THE TYMBESTERES REAPPEAR—MOONLIGHT ON THE REVEL OF THE LIVING—MOONLIGHT ON THE SLUMBER OF THE DEAD.
The father and child made their resting-place under the giant oak. They knew not whither to fly for refuge; the day and the night had become the same to them,—the night menaced with robbers, the day with the mob. If return to their home was forbidden, where in the wide world a shelter for the would-be world-improver? Yet they despaired not, their hearts failed them not. The majestic splendour of the night, as it deepened in its solemn calm; as the shadows of the windless trees fell larger and sharper upon the silvery earth; as the skies grew mellower and more luminous in the strengthening starlight, inspired them with the serenity of faith,—for night, to the earnest soul, opens the Bible of the universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is written, “God is everywhere.”
Their hands were clasped each in each, their pale faces were upturned; they spoke not, neither were they conscious that they prayed, but their silence was thought, and the thought was worship.
Amidst the grief and solitude of the pure, there comes, at times, a strange and rapt serenity,—a sleep-awake,—over which the instinct of life beyond the grave glides like a noiseless dream; and ever that heaven that the soul yearns for is coloured by the fancies of the fond human heart, each fashioning the above from the desires unsatisfied below.