With the assistance of his attendant he mounted his horse; and despatching Joey instantly with injunctions to fly, if possible, to Alma for the doctor and bring him to Fern Vale, he turned his own horse's head homewards, and proceeded as fast as the animal with his additional burden could travel.
Bright and beautiful the morning dawned as he rode towards his home; but serene as were the sublimities of nature their contemplation had no place in his mind. All his thoughts were centred in the inaminate form encircled by his arms. Thus he rode unconscious to all around, and would have so ridden to the end of his journey had not a faint sigh struck his ear; and he instantly stopped his horse to enable him to enjoy the sight of returning vitality to his much loved Eleanor. He gently removed the covering that he had placed over her face, when her melancholy eyes for a moment rested upon his. It was only for a moment, however, for they were instantly secluded from the light by the closing lids; and, considering it better not to agitate her with conversation, and satisfied for the time with the assurance of his hearing and vision, he impressed one rapturous kiss on her fair forehead, again covered her face from the morning air, and proceeded on his way.
CHAPTER XII.
"All those rivers
That fed her veins with warm and crimson streams
Frozen and dried up; if these be signs of death,
Then is she dead.... But I will be true
E'en to her dust and ashes."
Decker.
Mr. Rainsfield pursued his way homewards little anticipating the sight that awaited him on his arrival; but, owing to the heavy state of the roads from the saturation of the ground, he was only enabled to travel slowly. Consequently he perceived the flood coming down the Gibson long before he reached the crossing-place of the Wombi; and, knowing that there would be no use attempting a passage there, since the bridge had been swept away, he at once struck off for the Dingo Plains to get over by the upper crossing-place. By making this detour it was near morning before he approached the station.
Upon his reaching home he at once went to the stable and attended to his horse, the first consideration of a bushman, and then bent his steps to the house, feeling an unaccountable sensation of awe, which the pervading solitude and death-like stillness inspired him with. This feeling he was ashamed to indulge in, and tried to banish it from his mind and deceive his conscience by attempting to whistle a lively air, while he submitted his right boot to a playful castigation with his riding-whip. All these stratagems, however, proved futile: a gloom had settled upon him which he could not shake off, and he hastened his steps to his dwelling with his heart in a perturbation that gave place to the most fearful apprehensions as he perceived the house open to free ingress. The truth at once burst upon him with overwhelming force, and he rushed like one demented into the room where he had expected to meet the embrace of his wife, but only to witness her mutilated remains surrounded by those of her children. He gazed upon their forms for some minutes in the uncertain light with a sad, though calm and almost stoical cast of countenance; and then, kneeling by the side of his wife's body, he parted her clotted hair from off her brow, which he stooped down and kissed, and, while dashing a scalding tear from his eye, thus apostrophised the fane of the departed spirit:
"And was it for this I left you, my darling Mary, to seek for you protection, and obtain assistance to drive the disturbers of our happiness from the land? Oh! that I could but have foreseen this, to have either preserved you and our poor little innocents, or perished while I shielded your heart with my breast. Curses on my cruel fate, and the blinding fancies of security which led me away from your side. Oh, Mary, Mary! more dear to me than life, to have lost you thus, butchered! by a set of ruthless savages, consumes my very heart. But you shall be revenged. By heaven! you shall." And, springing to his feet with clenched fists, and gazing into space as the whole expression of his countenance changed, he continued:
"What is life to me now, deprived of all the ties that bound me to this earth? It shall be devoted to the cause of vengeance; and here, Mary! in the presence of your spirit, and in the sight of my Maker, I swear to be revenged upon all the blacks in this country; never shall one cross my path alive. I'll spare neither their old nor their young. I'll hunt them from their dens, like the vermin that they are. They shall be made to bite the dust. Their bodies shall rot, and their bones bleach in the sun. Never shall they rest until they are wholly exterminated, or my strength and life fail me; and I swear that so long as one black remains of all their race my vengeance shall not be satisfied. Hear me, Mary! while I pray to God for the strength of Hercules, and the age of Methuselah, that I may be a terror to their species, and they may learn to curse the day when first they tasted the blood of mine. And oh, Mary! if thou seest me from the portals of that abode where the eternal dwell, look down upon me and commend my work, help my weak arm; encourage my drooping spirit; be a light to beacon my path in the remainder of my gloomy passage through this world; and let not the cup of vengeance be removed from the lips of thy foul murderers until they have tasted of the very dregs. So now, my angel wife! my once fond and loving but now lost wife! sacrificed through thy husband's folly and neglect, if vengeance is sweet to thee thy spirit shall be appeased; for henceforth my name shall be one to strike dismay into the souls of blacks throughout the land. So help me God!"
Having uttered this fearful oath, and calling down the aid of his Maker to assist him in its performance, Rainsfield left the room and the house a broken-hearted man; re-saddled his horse, which he mounted, and went he knew not whither. His state was truly piteous; his better and softer nature was in perpetual warfare with his fiendish feelings, which prompted nothing but a thirst for vengeance. The memory of his wife, and the sudden shock occasioned by her loss and fearful death, had at first subdued the evil passions of the mortal; and he had gazed upon the placid features of the corpse with a calm and settled grief. But as he awoke to a plainer perception of the horrors of the event, and what must have been the sufferings of his defenceless family, with the brutality of their hellish assailants, all softer feelings evanished before the sterner one revenge; which in the one moment of decision he determined should be the sole object of his future life. In this frame of mind he left his home, that had so lately been smiling and happy but now gloomy, bloody, and to be shunned; for he felt to dwell under that roof again was impossible. His home for the future would be under the canopy of heaven, and his life that of the avenger. Thus he left the house, misfortune having so overcome his reason that he had no idea of further inspection of the building, possibly believing that all had met with the same fate, not even to glance into the room of Eleanor; and he wandered forth absorbed in grief, without any definite notion of where he was to go, or how he was to dispose of the bodies.