Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

Recovering presently from his shock of alarm, he trudged along through the inky water, quivering at every step lest he should feel the sting of the moccasin, or the crunching gripe of the alligator. It was a long journey across the open fen. The red light had faded from sky and water, and the full moon, which had lain like a pallid shell in the heavens when he left the forest behind him, had deepened into a lustrous orb of silver, and glistened on the gray water, as he approached the solid sable gloom of the thick-wooded wilderness.

An awful fancy had haunted his mind during his journey across the open fen—quiet, but very awful. A strange man, with a single dog, had followed him, at a considerable distance the whole way. A strange man, silent, with a silent dog, and plodding just at that distance, without coming, or trying to come, any nearer him. He knew that this was so, though he did not dare to turn his head to see if it was so. He knew too just how the man looked—a dark figure with a dark slouched hat, and the dog, also dark, by his side, just a little behind him. Oh, God!

The fancy fell from him as he came under the black trees again. Staggering on through thick darkness, broken only here and there by an uncertain glimmer or a pale ray of moonlight, or the blue flicker of a dancing and vanishing fen-light, he found the water still ankle or knee deep, and the walking difficult and dangerous, with logs and fallen trees and stumps and masses of bushes and briers, and with the deadly tenants of the pools. The fen seemed alive with the latter, and all about him, and in the branches overhead, there were such plungings and crashings, and such a clamor of flutterings and hootings and screechings, that his blood ran cold. He held his course, however, hoping to come upon some dry spot in the great swamp where he could stop and consider what to do to escape from this dreadful region. Rest he must have soon, for his body was giving way with hunger and fatigue. He was drenched from head to foot, and spite of the exertion of walking, he shivered with cold. His vitals were weak and aching for want of food; his head was light with sleeplessness; and insane fancies ran riot in his terror-goaded and horror-laden mind. One was that his legs, which felt numb and seemed heavier every time he lifted them, were slowly changing to iron, and that he would soon be unable to raise them for their weight, and would be obliged to stand there in the quagmire. Then in the glimmering darkness the moccasins would rise from the pools and surround him in a circle. They would gather in from all the swamp around, and pile on top of each other, till they made a high, high writhing wall about him of devilish serpent faces, swaying and bristling, and above them in the branches all the panthers would gather, savagely grinning at him, and every one would have the visage of Lafitte. Then all at once the writhing wall of snakes would sway forward, and strike him with a million fangs, and rebound and strike again with a regular and even motion, while his body would slowly swell, and his shrieks would ring in the darkness, and the panthers would look on with the face of his master, and laugh softly with the smooth voice of his master. And the writhing wall would dilate and expand till every snake was vaster than an anaconda, and the mass together would fall away at every rebound to a horrible distance, and reach up to the sky, and his body would swell at every million-fanged stroke till its monstrous bloat filled the dark world, and his shrieks would rise and resound through space, and the panthers and the tigers would dilate with the rest, and look on with enormous faces like his master’s, and their smooth laughter would grow louder and louder into smooth thunders of laughter, and the bristling and the striking and the swelling and the shrieking and the roaring mirth, would go on increasing forever and forever.

“Lord God Almighty help me! I’m going crazy!”

The words burst from him suddenly, as he felt the horrible fancy rush upon him with dreadful reality, and almost master him. All aghast with a new terror at the foreign and incongruous effect of his own tones in that haunted darkness, and amidst the unhuman voices around him, he was utterly appalled and confounded the next instant at the frightful clamor which rose with a simultaneous outburst, volleying tumultuously around him on every side like the multitudinous rush and uproar of devils when the silence of the magic circle has been broken and the enchanter is to be torn to pieces. Whooping, hooting, screaming, wailing, yelling, whirring, flapping, cackling, howling, bellowing and roaring—all rose together in a long continued and reverberating whirl and brawl, filling the darkness with a deafening din. Staggering madly forward, the terrified fugitive broke into a blind and frantic run, feeling as in a horrible dream, that the pools had changed to ground which was sloping rapidly up to strike him in the face and stop him; till at last with a sudden lightening of the darkness, something caught his feet and threw him headlong, and with an awful sense that he was seized, and with the hideous tintamar swirling downward like the gurgling roar of water in the ears of a drowning man, he swooned away.

IV.

Slowly that sluggish sea of swoon gave up its dead, and life revived. How long he had lain in that blank trance, he knew not. He felt that he was lying on bare, damp ground, and that the moonlight was around him. The din had sunk into confused and broken noises, sounding and echoing distantly through the darker depths of the moonlit forest, and the air around him was desolate and still. A clear, cold, remote stillness filled his mind. Gradually a dim sense of the former terror, mixed with consciousness of all he had passed through, and of the place he was in, began to invade the silent vacancy, and crept upon him as from afar. Shuddering slightly, with icy thrills crawling through his torpid blood, he slowly raised himself to his knees, and looked around him. With a vague relief, which was almost pleasure, he saw that he was kneeling on dry ground—a low acclivity sloping from the morass, clothed with giant trees, and barred with large spaces of grey moonlight and sable shadow. Behind him was the tough cordage of a ground-vine, in which his foot was still entangled. Disengaging the limb without rising from his knees, he continued to gaze, gradually yielding to an overwhelming sense of awe, as he took in more fully the dark and dreadful magnificence of the forest which loomed before him, like the interior of some infernal cathedral. Far away, through immense irregular vistas, diminishing in interminable perspective, the ground stretched in vast mosaics of sable and silver, bunched and ridged with low flowers and herbage and running vines, all moveless and colorless in the rich pallor of the moonlight, and in the solemn shadow, as though wrought in stone. Upborne on the enormous clustered columns of the trees, every trunk rising sheer like a massive shaft of rough ebony, darkly shining, and fretted and starred with the gleaming leaves and flowers of parasitical vines—masses of gloomy frondage, touched here and there with sullen glory, spread aloft and interwove like the groined concave of some tremendous gothic roof, while from the leaf-embossed and splendor-dappled arches, the long mosses drooped heavily, like black innumerable banners, above the giant aisles. The air was dank and chill, and laden with thick and stagnant odors from the night-blowing flowers. Fire-flies flitted and glimmered with crimson and emerald flames; fen-lights flickered and quivered bluely down the arcades in the morass; and all around from the bordering quagmire, and from the crypts and vaults of the shadows, the demon-voices of the region, sounding from above and below, and rapidly swelling into full choir, chanted in discordant chorus. Listening to their subterranean and aërial stridor, which rose in wild accordance with the ghastly pomp, the horrible and sombre grandeur of the scene, a dark imagination might have dreamed that some hellish mass in celebration of the monstrous crime against mankind which centered in this region, was pealing through the vaulted aisles and arches of a church whose bishop was the enemy of human souls. Here, to this dread cathedral, might gather in his wide and wicked diocese—the millions callous to the woes and wrongs of slaves—the myriads careless of all ills their fellows suffer, while their own selfish strivings prosper, and wealth and sensual comforts thrive around them. Peopling the vast and drear nocturnal solitudes, under the moonlit arches, here they might come, while the screaming, hooting, bellowing chant resounded, and kneel, a motley and innumerable concourse of base powers, in fell communion. Statesmen who hold the great object of government to be the protection of property in man, and wield the mighty engine of the state for the oppression of the weak; placemen who suck on office, deaf and blind to the interests of the poor; scurvy politicians, intent on pelf and power, who plot and scheme for tyranny, and legislate away the inalienable rights of men; Jesuit jurists, mocking at natural law, who decree that black men have no rights that white men are bound to respect; scholars, bastard to the blood of the learned and the brave, who prate with learned ignorance of manifest destiny and inferior races, to justify against all human instincts the cruel practice of the oppressor; hide-bound priests, who would turn the hunted fugitive from their doors, or consent that their brothers should go into slavery to save the Union; traders and slavers, an innumerable throng, mad-ravening with never-sated avarice, and furious against liberty and justice as lesseners of their gains; these, and their rabblement of catch-poles, and jail-birds, and kidnappers, and men-hunters, and slave-law commissioners—here they might assemble to pray that their conspiracy against mankind might prosper, and love and reverence for the soul die down in darkness, and man degrade into the brute and fiend. Fit place and time, and fit surroundings for such rites as these; fitter far than for the trembling murmurs of a solitary slave, kneeling in the dreary moonlight, and pouring out the forlorn agony of his spirit in prayer to the God of the poor.

Some dim association of the aspect of the forest with the cathedrals he had seen many years before when he was a slave in New Orleans; some dim sense that he was on his knees in the attitude of supplication, had mixed with the overwhelming consciousness of his helplessness, his wretchedness, and his danger, and impelled him to pray. Fervently, in uncouth words and broken tones, he poured forth the mournful and despairing litany of a soul haunted with horror, encompassed with perils, and yearning for deliverance. The demoniac clamor of the forest rose louder and louder as he went on, breaking his communion with God, till at length, appalled by the unhallowed din, he ceased, and rising to his feet, uncomforted and terrified, staggered weakly on his way.

He was very feeble now, and his strength was so nearly gone that he tottered. His setting forward again was a mere mechanical action, but it continued for some minutes before the dull thought came to him that his movement was useless. In his agonizing desire for sleep, he tried to climb a tree, where, lodged in a fork of the branches, he thought he would be safer and more comfortable than on the ground; but even with the advantage of the parasitical vine which covered its trunk, his strength was not equal to the effort. He was in the last stages of exhaustion.

Sitting upon the ground, he resolved to keep awake till morning, when there would be less danger of wild beasts, and he might dare to repose. He sat for a long time shuddering with cold, and watching intently all about him, lest some panther should spring upon him unawares. Once or twice, with a start of terror, he caught himself nodding; and at length, affrighted at the possible consequences of his dropping off into slumber, he strove to occupy his mind by observing minutely the various details of the scene before him. He had been busy at this for some time, when he became suddenly and quietly perplexed with the feeling that there was something he ought to take notice of, but was unable to remember or define what it was. All the while he was vacantly gazing at the hole of a gigantic cypress rising from a dense clump of dwarf palmettoes, slightly silvered by a faint ray of moonlight, and from time to time he saw, without receiving any impression therefrom, a dim vapor glide athwart the palmetto leaves. Suddenly but quietly it came to him that what he ought to have noticed was a peculiar odor, and startled a little, he strove to shake the torpor from his mind, and think. What could it be? As suddenly and quietly as before it came to him, and at the same moment his eye took in the meaning of that curious mist gliding over the palmettoes. It was the smell of smoke, and yonder was its source. Thoroughly roused now, and vaguely alarmed, he scrambled up on his feet, with a little strength returning to his body, and gazed in stupefaction at the misty ringlets lazily stealing across the leaves. It certainly was smoke; he smelled now very distinctly the dry scent of burning wood. Who could have a fire in the heart of the swamp at this time of night? At first, superstitious fancies rose in his mind, for the thought that any person could be here with him was inconceivable. But gradually recovering self-possession, he resolved, for he was naturally courageous, to go forward and solve the mystery; and taking the knife from the back of his neck, he cautiously approached the palmettoes, his blood thrilling, and his heart beating, and all the forest resonant around him. Peering through the leaves, he saw with amazement a pile of smouldering embers duskily glimmering in front of a large hole in the trunk. The tree was hollow. A sort of fright fell upon him, and he retreated; but recovering instantly, he again advanced, and nerved to desperation, spoke in a voice faint both from weakness and trepidation: