“Faith always seems to me the function of the soul, as reason is of the mind. You can believe an error, but mistakes are not founded on reason.”
Then she asked him suddenly if the stress that the Cherokees laid on this amulet did not remind him of the attributes of the ark of the Hebrews and their despair because of its capture.
“The ark was a type,—a type,” he declared, looking off with unseeing eyes into the blue and roseate sky and launching out into a dissertation on the image and the reality, the prophecy and its fulfilment, with many a digression to a cognate theme, while Captain Howard affected to listen and went over in his mind his quarter-master’s accounts, the state of the armament of the fort, and the equipment of the men, all having relation to the settling of his affairs in quitting his command. The younger people chatted in low voices under cover of the monologue, it not being directly addressed to them.
They had slowly strolled along the rampart as they talked, the two elderly men in the rear, the girl in the centre, with her charming fair-haired beauty, more ethereal because of that pervasive, tempered, pearly light which just precedes the dusk, while the young officers, in the foppery of their red coats, their white breeches, their cocked hats, and powdered hair, kept on either side. The party made their way out from the dead salient of the angle, only to be defended by the musketry of soldiers standing on the banquettes, and ascended the rising ground to the terre-pleine, where cannon were mounted en barbette to fire above the parapet.
As Arabella noticed the great guns, standing a-tilt, she said they reminded her of grim hounds holding their muzzles up to send forth fierce howls of defiance.
“They can send forth something fiercer than howls,” said Raymond, applausively. He was a very young soldier, and thought mighty well of the little cannon. Captain Howard, who had seen war on a fine scale and was used to forts of commensurate armament, could not repress a twinkle of the eye, although for no consideration would he have said aught to put the subaltern out of conceit with his little guns.
The other cannon were pointed through embrasures beneath the parapet. One of them had been run back on its chassis. She paused beside it, and stood looking through the large aperture, languid, and silent, and vaguely wistful, at the scene from a new point of view.
As she lingered thus, all fair-haired in her faint green dress, with her hat on her arm full of violets, one hand on the silent cannon, she seemed herself a type of spring, of some benison of peace, of some grave and tender mediatrix.
The foam was aflash on the rapids of the Keowee River; the sound of its rush was distinct in the stillness. Now and again the lowing of cattle came from some distant ranch of pioneer settlers. The Indian town of Keowee on the opposite side of the river was distinct to view, with its conical roofs and its great rotunda on a high mound, all recognizable, despite the reduction of size to the proportions of the landscape of the distance. No wing was now astir in the pallid, colorless sky. One might hardly say whence the light emanated, for the sun was down, the twilight sped, and yet the darkness had not fallen. A sort of gentle clarity possessed the atmosphere. She noted the line of the parapet of the covered way, heretofore invisible because of the high stockade, and beyond still the slope of the glacis, and there—
“What is that?” she said, starting forward, peering through the embrasure into the gathering gloom. A dark object was visible just beyond the crest of the glacis. It was without form, vague, opaque, motionless, and of a consistency impossible to divine.