“Oh, that will come right when she marries little Theodore,” replied Helena, with tranquil satisfaction. “The person I am sorry for is auntie. I’m sure I cried with her for nearly an hour.”
CHAPTER XLI
THUNDER IN THE TROPICS
The scene changes.
For one moment we look, with clearer eyes than the poor old Dowager’s, across the cruel waste of waters into a very real dreamland, and we see Gerard, Baron van Helmont, after two years of weary waiting for glory, wearily waiting for glory still.
Gerard van Helmont stood before his hut in the compound of the little fort under his command on the Acheen River. All round him trembled, with soft persistence, the thousand breathings of the tropic night.
An hour ago it had flung itself, the sudden blackness, down the slopes of the Barissan Mountains, and away across the green islands of the Indian Ocean. It had fallen with the swiftness of a blow, wiping out all the luxuriance of dreamy glories that lay reposefully burning in endless variations of verdure under the moist veil of paludal heat. The wide sea of tropical foliage that laughed down the sides of the valley till within a few yards of the river fort had sunk back from view like a swiftly receding tide, and a living silence now brooded over these jungles a-quiver with hate. The roar of the million frogs in the marshes had at last ceased to beat against never-accustomed ears, and all the other manifold murmurs and flutterings had died down to one dully penetrative tone, whose ringing music, in its rhythmical rise and fall, swelled upon the ear of the listener like the pulse-beat of the world. Now and then the sudden howlings of distant wild dogs broke out hideously, or the clattering shriek of the tokkèh resounded from the woods. And throughout the long darkness came the swish of the turbid water among its reeds and overhanging branches, as it went playing around the masses of logs and rotten refuse over which it quarrels day and night in slow pushings with the sea.