The aristocrats

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

A mate had joined the buck and they cropped and drank for a few moments, then walked along the shore and into an arbour-like opening of the forest, exactly like people making a stately exit from the back of a stage. Almost immediately two does came bounding out of the forest and waded into the water until only their heads and red backs were visible. We remained motionless, almost breathless, but in a few moments they must have noticed us for they made hotly for the shore. When they reached it they stood for at least five minutes with their heads thrown back staring at us. Then, although we were, apparently, as lifeless as the lily pads, their reasoning faculty must have satisfied them that we were aliens and therefore to be feared, for they suddenly turned their backs and made for the forest as hard as they could go, leaping over one high bush after another, until nothing could be seen but the white lining of their tails. Then the exhibition being over we talked all the way home, and that strange sense of intimacy with a note of mystery in it was dispelled.

It was to be renewed, however, for we had not done with the deer. That night at eleven o’clock, when Mr. Van Worden was sound asleep—he really is very dull—Mrs. Van W. and I, Mr. Nugent and Mr. Latimer stole down to the boat house by the light of a lantern. We were muffled up in the darkest things we possessed and I felt exactly as if we were conspirators, or smugglers, or refugees from justice.

In the boat house the men lit a lamp they had brought and placed it in a wooden case, open in front, which was on the end of a pole about three feet high. (This light is called a Jack.) The pole was set into a hole on the bow of the boat Mr. N. intended to paddle, and it was to serve as a sort of search light, not only to see the deer by, but to fascinate what moth-like instinct they possessed.

All prepared, we pushed silently out into the lake. Can you imagine the scene? The mountains—there are so many of them!—were black. The sky seemed dropping with its weight of stars. The clear glassy lake reflected the largest of them and the black masses of the forest that rose straight from its brink. And just ahead of me—shall I ever forget it?—floated a white mist, rising and falling, writhing into a different semblance every moment, the light making it the more ghostly and terrifying. I could not see a living thing; the other boat was behind us and I was in the bow as before, staring at that ghostly mist, quite forgetting the deer. A line of Tennyson’s haunted me:

“The dead steered by the dumb went upward with the flood,”

and I longed to utter it aloud, but dared not. Once I turned my head to see if Mr. N. were really there. He looked black and graven, as if indeed he were the dumb servitor. The others I could not see at all. And again there was that sense of gliding, unpropelled, through the silences of the upper Universe, only a thousand times intensified. And, surely, never were so many stars gathered together before. It seemed to me that the big ones must drop into the lake, they looked so heavy, and so close, and the little ones were like a million grains of golden sand. I thought of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the princess who carried a robe of stars in a nut-shell.

But more often I watched that white mist, just in front of the prow and me, and nowhere else. Where did it come from? I have no idea. They tell me there was a mist everywhere, and that by the aid of our light we saw it just ahead, but I saw none of it elsewhere, and I saw the stars and the trees in the lake.

We must have floated for a half hour, searching almost every inch of the banks without a glimpse of deer, when Mr. N.’s paddle stopped suddenly. At the same moment I heard a slight trampling in the brush close by, then a louder, as if a great buck had been brought to bay and were pawing up the earth. Then there was a terrific snort—I had no idea anything could snort so loud—then a long warning whistle, then another snort, and another. By this time he had made up his mind to flee the danger, for the snorts were accompanied by a crashing through the brush in the opposite direction. The faster he went the louder he snorted, until distance tempered the sound. It must have been five minutes before the last faint note of his anger came back to us.

“I am afraid he has warned off all the others,” came that low hoarse whisper from behind me, and it was the last touch needed to deepen the mystery of that unreal midnight.

Mr. N. paddled for ten or fifteen minutes longer, then giving it up, made for the boat house. We glided in noiselessly and he helped me out at once and extinguished the light. Then we stood on the narrow pier between the boat and the other slip of enclosed water waiting for Latimer and Mrs. Van W. There was no sign of them on the dark lake for several moments, and we were obliged to stand very close on that strip of wood in the darker boat house. I can assure you it was very weird; but with a man like Mr. N. beside one it was impossible to feel frightened. In the boat he seemed so far away. Of course I imagined that all sorts of things had happened to the others, but presently they came gliding toward us and into the boat house. We all stole home—without a word. It was long before I fell asleep.