He asked a question: "What has happened?"
While he had been lying there much had happened. Life and death had battled over him, and life had triumphed. When he recovered from the effects of his fall and found himself bleeding, he tried to rise and stanch the flow, but, already exhausted, he fell back almost fainting from the effort. He called repeatedly for help, but his only reply was the hideous face of his guard, silently leering at him for a moment, then disappearing without a word, At last it occurred to him that he had been left there to die, and he roused all his energies to his aid. How we strive for our lives! But Shirley accomplished nothing, he could not even raise his hand to the bleeding shoulder, with every effort the blood flowed more copiously. His mind was rapidly becoming benumbed like his body, which shivered as though it were mid winter. Darkness came over his eyes, and as he listened to the din of the battle he fell into a dreamy state that soon passed into seeming unconsciousness again. Nevertheless, while the doctor came and went and did his work, and the savage scowled at him, yet gave his life's blood to save him, though he lay like a dead man and saw them not, nor heard them, nor even felt the needle in his flesh, his mind was not idle. Strange doubts and fears, wild longings and regrets, sweet thoughts of long-forgotten happiness, and fair visions of the future, busied his brain. Memory unrolled her scroll and breathed upon the letters of his story that lapse of time and press of circumstance had made dim, till they grew clear, and with himself he lived his life again, and nothing was lost out of it or forgotten. There was his mother's face again, with the old, old loving smile upon her lips and the tender mother-love in the depths of her beautiful blue eyes—lips that had so oven kissed away his childish tears, and had taught him to say at evening, "Our Father" and "Now I lay me down to sleep," eyes that had never looked upon him without something of the heavenly light of which they were now so full. There before him, bright and clear as ever, were the scenes of his boyhood—the school-forms defaced with many a rude cutting of names and dates, the master knitting his shaggy brows and tapping meaningly with his ruler upon the awful desk while some white haired urchin floundered through an ill-learned task and his classmates tittered at his blunders. Dear old classmates! How their faces shone and gladdened as they chased the bounding football! How merrily they flushed and glowed when the clear frosty air of the Northern winter quivered with the ring of their skates upon the hard ice! How soberly side by side they solved problems and looked up sesquipedalia verba in big lexicons! And how happily the late evening hours wore away as they read Ivanhoe and the Leather Stocking Tales by the fireside with shellbarks and pippins!
Then the college days flew by with all their romance and delight. Again there were bells ringing to morning prayers, recitations and lectures, examinations and prizes, speeches and medals, and the glorious friendships, pure, earnest, almost holy. Would there were more such friendships in the outer, wider world! Commencement with its "pomp and circumstance," its tedious ceremony and scholarly display, its friends from home—mothers, sisters, sweethearts, all bright eyes and fond hearts, its music and flowers, its caps, gowns, dress-coats and "spreads," and, last and worst of all, its sorrowful "good-byes," some of them, alas! for ever! Once more he trembled as he rose to make his commencement speech, but slowly, as he went on, his voice grew steady and his manner calmer, for, lad as he was, and tyro at "orations," he was in earnest. "May my light hand forget its cunning, O my brother! may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, O ye oppressed! if ever there comes to me an opportunity to help you win your way to freedom and I fail you!" He, the aristocrat of his class, had chosen to speak "Against Caste," and though he spoke with the enthusiasm of an untried man, it was with devoted honesty of purpose, of which his earnestness was witness, and of which his future was to give ample proof. Again in vision he stood before that assembly and spoke for the lowly and oppressed. "Let every man have place and honor as he proves himself worthy. Make the way clear for all."
Through the bewilderment of applause that greeted him as he finished he saw only the glad, smiling face of Alice Wentworth nodding approval of the rest, hundreds though they were, he saw nothing. Her congratulation was enough.
Then came tenderer scenes, and Alice Wentworth was to be his wife. Another change, and he is in the midst of ruder scenes. There is war, civil war, and he is a soldier, once more he seems to be in Virginia, and there are marches and counter-marches, camps and barracks, battles and retreats, and all the great and little miseries of long campaigns. The silver leaflets of a major are exchanged for the golden eagles of a colonel, and all the time, amid sterner duties, he finds time to write to Alice Wentworth, and never a mail comes into camp but he is sure of letters dated 'Home' and full of words that make him hopeful and brave, "'Home!' Yes hers and mine too, if home's where the heart is!'" he thinks, and he loves her more dearly every day.
Negro troops are raised, and, true to his principles and to himself, he resigns his commission to take a lower rank in a colored regiment. Now the scenes grow dim, confused sounds far off disturb him, low music, familiar yet strange, now distant, now at his very ear, attracts him, a weird, shadowy mist encloses him, concealing even the things which were visible to the mind's eye, and memory and thought have almost ceased. Yet while all else fades away, clear and beautiful before him are two faces that cannot be forgotten—his mother's face, and that other, which he loves, if that can be, even more. Thus, with the 'Our Father' not on his lips, but fixed in his mind, he feels himself drifting away—drifting away like a boat that has broken its moorings and drifts out with the ebbing tide—whither?
But the rich, warm, lusty blood of the African quickly does its work. The heart, which had almost ceased to beat, because there was not blood enough for it to contract upon, reacted to the stimulus, and as it revived and sent the new life pulsating through all the body the whole man revived, and again:
The fever called living burned in his brain.
Fournier, under one pretext or another, but really by the force of his relentless will, kept his victim by him for years after their escape from the South. He noted from time to time certain curious changes that took place in his physical nature, and recorded his observations with scientific precision in a book kept for the purpose, for the renewal of life had entailed results of an extraordinary character, as the reader may have already anticipated. At length he wrote 'My hypothesis is verified, it has become a theory. My theory is proved, it is a physiological law. Climatic influences, acting upon man, bring about physical changes exceedingly slowly, because they are resisted by an inveterate habit of assimilation which pertains to the blood.'
That day Shirley was free. His rescuer had finished his experiment.