"Mohican, I die before my heart is soft!" uttered firmly, but with a struggle, reached his ears. Then came two long and heavy respirations. One was the returning breath of Uncas, and the other the dying sigh of the last Sachem of the broken and dispersed tribe of the Narragansetts.
Chapter XXXII.
"Each lonely scene shall thee restore;
For thee the tear be duly shed:
Beloved till life could charm no more,
And mourn'd till pity's self be dead."
Collins.
An hour later, and the principal actors in the foregoing scene had disappeared. There remained only the widowed Narra-mattah, with Dudley, the divine, and Whittal Ring.
The body of Conanchet still continued, where he had died, seated like a chief in council. The daughter of Content and Ruth had stolen to its side, and she had taken her seat, in that species of dull woe, which so frequently attends the first moments of any unexpected and overwhelming affliction. She neither spoke, sobbed, nor sorrowed in anyway that grief is wont to affect the human system. The mind seemed palsied, though a withering sense of the blow was fearfully engraven on every lineament of her eloquent face. The color had deserted her cheeks, the lips were bloodless, while, at moments, they quivered convulsively, like the tremulous movement of the sleeping infant; and, at long intervals, her bosom heaved, as if the spirit within struggled heavily to escape from its earthly prison. The child lay unheeded at her side, and Whittal Ring had placed himself on the opposite side of the corpse.
The two agents, appointed by the Colony to witness the death of Conanchet, stood near, gazing mournfully on the piteous spectacle. The instant the spirit of the condemned man had fled, the prayers of the divine had ceased, for he believed that then the soul had gone to judgment. But there was more of human charity, and less of that exaggerated severity in his aspect, than was ordinarily seated in the deep lines of his austere countenance. Now that the deed was done, and the excitement of his exalted theories had given way to the more positive appearance of the result, he might even have moments of harassing doubts concerning the lawfulness of an act that he had hitherto veiled under the forms of a legal and necessary execution of justice. The mind of Eben Dudley vacillated with none of the subtleties of doctrine or of law. As there had been less exaggeration in his original views of the necessity of the proceeding, so was there more steadiness in his contemplation of its fulfilment. Feelings, they might be termed emotions, of a different nature troubled the breast of this resolute but justly-disposed borderer.
"This hath been a melancholy visitation of necessity, and a severe manifestation of the foreordering will," said the Ensign, as he gazed at the sad spectacle before him. "Father and son have both died, as it were, in my presence, and both have departed for the world of spirits, in a manner to prove the inscrutableness of Providence. But dost not see, here, in the face of her who looketh like a form of stone, traces of a countenance that is familiar?"
"Thou hast allusion to the consort of Captain Content Heathcote?"
"Truly, to her only. Thou art not, reverend sir, of sufficient residence at the Wish-Ton-Wish, to remember that lady in her youthfulness. But to me, the hour when the Captain led his followers into the wilderness, seemeth but as a morning of the past season. I was then active in limb, and something idle in reflection and discourse; it was in that journey, that the woman who is now the mother of my children and I first made acquaintance. I have seen many comely females in my time, but never did I look on one so pleasant to the eye, as was the consort of the Captain until the night of the burning. Thou hast often heard the loss she then met, and, from that hour, her beauty hath been that of the October leaf rather than its loveliness in the season of fertility. Now look on the face of this mourner, and say if there be not here such an image as the water reflects from the overhanging bush. In verity, I could believe it was the sorrowing eye and bereaved look of the mother herself!"