"See," said Dred to Harry, as they were watching over the yet insensible form of Clayton, "how the word of the Lord is fulfilled on this people. He shall deliver them, every man into the hand of his neighbor; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey!"
"Yes," said Harry; "but this is a good man; he stands up for our rights. If he had his way, we should soon have justice done us."
"Yes," said Dred, "but it is even as it was of old; 'behold I send unto you prophets and wise men, and some of them shall ye slay. For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears have they closed. Therefore, the Lord shall bring upon this generation the blood of all the slain, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom they slew between the temple and the altar.'"
* * * * * * * * * * *
After a day or two spent in a kind of listless dreaming, Clayton was so far recovered as to be able to sit up and look about him. The serene tranquillity of the lovely October skies seemed to fall like a spell upon his soul.
Amidst the wild and desolate swamp, here was an island of security, where nature took men to her sheltering bosom. A thousand birds, speaking with thousand airy voices, were calling from breezy tree-tops, and from swinging cradles of vine-leaves; white clouds sailed, in changing and varying islands, over the heavy green battlements of the woods. The wavering, slumberous sound of thousand leaves, through which the autumn air walked to and fro, consoled him. Life began to look to him like a troubled dream, forever past. His own sufferings, the hours of agony and death which he had never dared to remember, seemed now to wear a new and glorified form. Such is the divine power in which God still reveals himself through the lovely and incorruptible forms of nature.
Clayton became interested in Dred, as a psychological study. At first he was silent and reserved, but attended to the wants of his guest with evident respect and kindness. Gradually, however, the love of expression, which lies hidden in almost every soul, began to unfold itself in him, and he seemed to find pleasure in a sympathetic listener. His wild jargon of hebraistic phrases, names, and allusions, had for Clayton, in his enfeebled state, a quaint and poetic interest. He compared him, in his own mind, to one of those old rude Gothic doorways, so frequent in European cathedrals, where scriptural images, carved in rough granite, mingle themselves with a thousand wayward, fantastic freaks of architecture; and sometimes he thought, with a sigh, how much might have been accomplished by a soul so ardent and a frame so energetic, had they been enlightened and guided.
Dred would sometimes come, in the shady part of the afternoon, and lie on the grass beside him, and talk for hours in a quaint, rambling, dreamy style, through which there were occasional flashes of practical ability and shrewdness.
He had been a great traveller—a traveller through regions generally held inaccessible to human foot and eye. He had explored not only the vast swamp-girdle of the Atlantic, but the everglades of Florida, with all their strange and tropical luxuriance of growth; he had wandered along the dreary and perilous belt of sand which skirts the southern Atlantic shores, full of quicksands and of dangers, and there he had mused of the eternal secret of the tides, with whose restless, never-ceasing rise and fall the soul of man has a mysterious sympathy. Destitute of the light of philosophy and science, he had revolved in the twilight of his ardent and struggling thoughts the causes of natural phenomena, and settled these questions for himself by theories of his own. Sometimes his residence for weeks had been a stranded hulk, cast on one of these inhospitable shores, where he fasted and prayed, and fancied that answering voices came to him in the moaning of the wind and the sullen swell of the sea.