We did not linger a moment, for we both knew that it was not unusual for a thunder shower to come up, in that mountainous region, with a rapidity almost inconceivable to those who have never lived in so elevated a position. Hastily seizing her hat, and throwing her chaplet over her bright brow, she set forth smiling as gaily as ever, to return by the shortest path to our home.
For nearly a half an hour we pursued our way through the forest, but at every step we perceived that the storm was coming up more rapidly, until at length the smiles of Agnes ceased, and we pursued our now hurried way in silence, save when an exclamation from my fair companion betokened some new and angrier aspect of the sky.
“Oh! Harry,” she said, at length, “we shall get drenched through—see, the tempest is at hand, and we have yet more than a mile to go.”
I looked up. The storm was indeed at our doors. Yet it was as magnificent a spectacle as I had ever beheld. The heavens were as black as pitch, save now and then when for a moment they were obscured by a lurid canopy of dust, swept upward from the highway, giving earth and sky the appearance as of the day of doom. Now the wind wailed out in the forest, and now whirled wildly past us. The trees groaned and bent in the gale, their branches streaming out like banners on the air. Anon, all was still. How deep and awful and seemingly endless was that boding repose. Agnes shrank closer to my side, her face paler than ashes, and her slight form trembling with ill-concealed agitation. Not a house was in sight. I saw that our only shelter was the forest, and I retreated, therefore, beneath a huge overshadowing oak, whose gnarled and aged branches might have defied a thousand years. As I did so a few rain drops pattered heavily to the earth—then came another silence—and then with a rushing-sound through the forest, as if an army was at hand, the tempest was upon us.
Never had I beheld such a storm. It seemed as if earth and heaven had met in battle, and that each was striving amid the ruins of a world for the mastery. The first rush of the descending rain was like a deluge, bending the mightiest trees like reeds beneath it, and filling the hollows of the forest road with a flood of water. Suddenly a vivid flash of lightning shot across the heaven, and then at a short interval followed a clap of thunder. Agnes clung closely to my arm, her face wild with affright. With a few hurried words I strove to sooth her, pressing her still closer, and with strange delight, to my bosom. As I did so she burst into tears. Her conduct—I cannot explain why—filled me with a joy I had long despaired of, and in the impulse of the moment, I said,
“Dear Agnes! fear not. I am beside you, and will die with you.”
She looked up, all tearful as she was, into my eyes, and strove to speak, but her emotion was too great, and, with a glance I shall never forget, buried her face against my shoulder. I pressed her closer to my heart. I felt a wild ecstacy tingling through every vein, such as I had never experienced. I could not resist my feelings longer.
“Agnes! dear, dear Agnes,” I said, bending over her, “I love you. Oh! will you be mine if we escape?”
She made me no answer, but sobbed aloud. I pressed her hand. The pressure was gently returned. I wanted nothing more to assure me of her affection. I was in a dream of wildering delight at the conviction.
For a moment I had forgotten the tempest in my ecstacy. But suddenly I was aroused from my rapture by a succession of loud and reiterated peals, bursting nearer and nearer overhead, and I looked up now in real alarm, wishing that we had kept the forest road, exposed as we would have been to the rain, rather than subject ourselves to the dangers of our present position. I determined even yet to fly from our peril, and taking Agnes by the waist, urged her trembling steps onward. We had but escaped from beneath the oak when a blinding flash of lightning zig-zagged from one horizon to the other, and instantaneously a peal of thunder, which rings in my ears even yet, burst right over us, and went crackling and echoing down the sky, as if a thousand chariots were driving furiously over its adamantine pavement. But this I scarcely noticed at the time, though it filled my memory afterward, for the flash of lightning seeming to dart from every quarter of the heaven, and unite right over us, shot directly downward, and in the next instant the oak under which we had been standing, riven in twain, stood a scarred and blackened wreck, against the frowning sky. I felt my senses reeling: I thought all was over.