This great point being laid bare, she at once considered the circumstances, and the recollection of the last speech of Appadocca fell upon her heart, like the chilling hand of death. She sat in silent sorrow, and the evening had long yielded to night, when her father returned from the Savannahs to interrupt her grief, and to divert for a few moments the dark and troubled currents of her thoughts.
CHAPTER XXII.
“This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,
And much, much different from the man he was;
But till this afternoon, his passion
Ne’er brake into extremity of rage.”
Comedy of Errors.
The night was far advanced, when Appadocca undertook to carry into execution, the design which he had formed of leaving the Rancha. He cautiously went out of the apartment which he occupied, and found no difficulty in opening the carelessly fastened door of the house. He went out softly, and when he had got outside, he had to stand still for a moment, in order to have recourse to his memory to help him to form some sort of idea of the position in which he found himself: such was the excessive darkness. Had he previously petitioned nature for a night, which might effectually shroud him from any one that might pursue him, she could not have sent one that was more dark or dismal. The blackness of the wilds, heightened a thousand-fold that of the night, which itself required no augmentation. Objects seemed heaped together in one pitchy chaos, and nature seemed to sleep heavily under a canopy of gloom. The fire flies that flew low and lonely on the level Savannahs, seemed to show their light, merely to point out the surrounding darkness. In the same proportion with this thick gloom was the silence of the hour, which permitted the faintest sounds to be heard. At long intervals the brief but sonorous cry of the owl, as it signaled to its mate, would fall upon the ear; or there might be heard the hoarse and unearthly shriek of the night raven, as it vented its rage at the falling of some fruit, which it carried in its beak; or, perhaps, the low sound of some tethered and invisible horse that cropped the short grass hard by.
Incapable of seeing one foot before him, Appadocca could not proceed. He remembered well where he was, but the darkness confounded his calculation, and he knew not in what direction to move.