In the mean time, Marmaduke and his daughter were closeted for more than an hour, nor shall we invade the sanctuary of parental love, by relating the conversation. When the curtain rises on the reader, the Judge is seen walking up and down the apartment, with a tender melancholy in his air, and his child reclining on a settee, with a flushed cheek, and her dark eyes seeming to float in crystals.
“It was a timely rescue! it was, indeed, a timely rescue, my child!” cried the Judge. “Then thou didst not desert thy friend, my noble Bess?”
“I believe I may as well take the credit of fortitude,” said Elizabeth, “though I much doubt if flight would have availed me anything, had I even courage to execute such an intention. But I thought not of the expedient.”
“Of what didst thou think, love? where did thy thoughts dwell most, at that fearful moment?”
“The beast! the beast!” cried Elizabeth, veiling her face with her hand. “Oh! I saw nothing, I thought of nothing but the beast. I tried to think of better things, but the horror was too glaring, the danger too much before my eyes.”
“Well, well, thou art safe, and we will converse no more on the unpleasant subject. I did not think such an animal yet remained in our forests; but they will stray far from their haunts when pressed by hunger, and—”
A loud knocking at the door of the apartment interrupted what he was about to utter, and he bid the applicant enter. The door was opened by Benjamin, who came in with a discontented air, as if he felt that he had a communication to make that would be out of season.
“Here is Squire Doolittle below, sir,” commenced the major-domo. “He has been standing off and on in the door-yard for the matter of a glass; and he has summat on his mind that he wants to heave up, d'ye see; but I tells him, says I, man, would you be coming aboard with your complaints, said I, when the judge has gotten his own child, as it were, out of the jaws of a lion? But damn the bit of manners has the fellow, any more than if he was one of them Guineas down in the kitchen there; and so as he was sheering nearer, every stretch he made toward the house, I could do no better than to let your honor know that the chap was in the offing.”
“He must have business of importance,” said Marmaduke: “something in relation to his office, most probably, as the court sits so shortly.”
“Ay, ay, you have it, sir,” cried Benjamin; “it's summat about a complaint that he has to make of the old Leather-Stocking, who, to my judgment, is the better man of the two. It's a very good sort of a man is this Master Bumppo, and he has a way with a spear, all the same as if he was brought up at the bow-oar of the captain's barge, or was born with a boat-hook in his hand.”