University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.

Flying from the house, as if by so doing he might
lose the thoughts that had roused him there into a
paroxysm of that fierce passion which too much indulgence
had made habitual, he rambled, only half conscious
of his direction, from cluster to cluster of the
old trees, until the seductive breeze of the evening,

coming up from the river, led him down into that
quarter. The stream lay before him in the shadow of
night, reflecting clearly the multitude of starry eyes
looking down from the heavens upon it, and with but a
slight ripple, under the influence of the evening breeze,
crisping its otherwise settled bosom. How different
from his—that wanderer! The disappointed love—the
vexed ambition—the feverish thirst for the unknown,
perhaps for the forbidden, increasing his agony at every
stride which he took along those quiet waters. It was
here in secret places, that his passion poured itself
forth—with the crowd it was all kept down by the
stronger pride, which shrunk from the thought of
making its feelings public property. With them he was
simply cold and forbidding, or perhaps recklessly and
inordinately gay. This was his policy. He well
knew how great is the delight of the vulgar mind
when it can search and tent the wound which it discovers
you to possess. How it delights to see the
victim writhe under its infliction, and, with how much
pleasure its ears drink in the groans of suffering, particularly
the suffering of the heart. He knew that men
are never so well content, once apprized of the sore,
as when they are probing it; unheeding the wincings,
or enjoying them with the same sort of satisfaction
with which the boy tortures the kitten—and he determined,
in his case at least, to deprive them of that
gratification. He had already learned how much we
are the sport of the many, when we become the
victims of the few.

The picture of the night around him was not for
such a mood. There is a condition of mind necessary
for the due appreciation of each object and enjoyment,
and harmony is the life-principle, as well of man as
of nature. That quiet stream, with its sweet and
sleepless murmur—those watchful eyes, clustering in
capricious and beautiful groups above, and peering
down, attended by a thousand frail glories, into the
mirrored waters beneath—those bending trees, whose
matted arms and branches, fringing in the river, made

it a hallowed home for the dreaming solitary—they
chimed not in with that spirit, which, now ruffled by
crossing currents, felt not, saw not, desired not their
influences. At another time, in another mood, he had
worshipped them; now, their very repose and softness,
by offering no interruption to the train of his own wild
musings, rather contributed to their headstrong growth.
The sudden tempest had done the work—the storm
precedes a degree of quiet which in ordinary nature
is unknown.

“Peace, peace—give me peace!” he cried, to the
elements. The small echo from the opposite bank, cried
back to him, in a tone of soothing, “peace”—but he
waited not for its answer. “Wherefore do I ask?” he
murmured to himself, “and what is it that I ask?
Peace, indeed! Repose, rather—release, escape—a free
release from the accursed agony of this still pursuing
thought. Is life peace, even with love attained, with
conquest, with a high hope realized—with an ambition
secure in all men's adoration! Peace, indeed! Thou
liest, thou life! thou art an imbodied lie,—wherefore
dost thou talk to me of peace? Ye elements, that murmur
on in falsehood,—stars and suns, streams, and ye
gnarled monitors—ye are all false. Ye would sooth,
and ye excite, lure, encourage, tempt, and deny.
The peace of life is insensibility—the suicide of mind
or affection. Is that a worse crime than the murder
of the animal? Impossible. I may not rob the heart of
its passion—the mind of its immortality; and the death
of matter is absurd. Ha! there is but one to care—but
one,—and she is old. A year—a month—and the loss
is a loss no longer. There is too much light here for
that. Why need these stars see—why should any see,
or hear, or know? When I am silent they will shine
--and the waters rove on, and she--she will be not
less happy that I come not between her and—. A
dark spot--gloomy and still, where the groan will
have no echo, and no eye may trace the blood which
streams from a heart that has only too much within it.”

Thus soliloquizing, in the aberration of intellect,

which was too apt to follow a state of high excitement
in the individual before us, he plunged into a small,
dark cavity of wood, lying not far from the river road,
but well concealed, as it was partly under the contiguous
swamp. Here, burying the handle of his bared
knife in the thick ooze of the soil upon which he
stood, the sharp point upwards, and so placed that it
must have penetrated, he knelt down at a brief space
from it, and, with a last thought upon the mother whom
he could not then forbear to think upon, he strove to
pray. But he could not—the words stuck in his
throat, and he gave it up in despair. He turned to the
fatal weapon, and throwing open his vest, so as to free
the passage to his heart of all obstructions, with a
swimming and indirect emotion of the brain, he prepared
to cast himself, from the spot where he knelt, upon its
unvarying edge, but at that moment came the quick
tread of a horse's hoof to his ear; and with all that
caprice which must belong to the mind which, usually
good, has yet even for an instant purposed a crime not
less foolish than foul, he rose at once to his feet. The
unlooked-for sounds had broken the spell of the scene
and situation; and seizing the bared weapon, he advanced
to the edge of the swamp, where it looked down
upon the road which ran alongside. The sounds
rapidly increased in force; and at length, passing
directly along before him, his eye distinguished the
outline of a person whom he knew at once to be Harrison.
The rider went by, but in a moment after,
the sounds had ceased. His progress had been arrested,
and with an emotion, strange and still seemingly
without purpose, and for which he did not seek to
account, Grayson changed his position, and moved
along the edge of the road to where the sounds of the
horse had terminated. His fingers clutched the knife,
bared for a different purpose, with a strange sort of
ecstasy. A sanguinary picture of triumph and of terror
rose up before his eyes; and the leaves and the trees,
to his mind, seemed of the one hue, and dripping with
gouts of blood. The demon was full in every thought.
A long train of circumstances and their concomitants
crowded upon his mental vision—circumstances of
strife, concealment, future success—deep, long-looked
for enjoyment—and still, with all, came the beautiful
image of Bess Matthews—

There was a delirious whirl—a rich, confused assemblage
of the strange, the sweet, the wild, in his spirit,
that in his morbid condition was a deep delight; and
without an effort to bring order to the adjustment of
this confusion, as would have been the case with a
well-regulated mind—without a purpose, in his own
view, he advanced cautiously and well concealed behind
the trees, and approached towards the individual
whom he had long since accustomed himself only to
regard as an enemy. Concealment is a leading influence
of crime with individuals not accustomed to
refer all their feelings and thoughts to the control
of just principles, and the remoteness and the silence,
the secrecy of the scene, and the ease with which the
crime could be covered up, were among the moving
causes which prompted the man to murder, who had a
little before meditated suicide.

Harrison had alighted from his horse, and was then
busied in fastening his bridle to a swinging branch of
the tree under which he stood. Having done this, and
carefully thrown the stirrups across the saddle, he left
him, and sauntering back a few paces to a spot of
higher ground, he threw himself, with the composure
of an old hunter, at full length upon the long grass,
which tufted prettily the spot he had chosen. This
done, he sounded merrily three several notes upon the
horn which hung about his neck, and seemed then to
await the coming of another.

The blast of the horn gave quickness to the approach
of Hugh Grayson, who had been altogether
unnoticed by Harrison; and he now stood in the
shadow of a tree, closely observing the fine, manly

outline, the graceful position, and the entire symmetry
of his rival's extended person. He saw, and his passions
grew more and more tumultuous with the survey.
His impulses became stronger as his increasing
thoughts grew more strange. There was a feeling of
strife, and a dream of blood in his fancy—he longed
for the one, and his eye saw the other—a rich, attractive,
abundant stream, pouring, as it were, from the
thousand arteries of some overshadowing tree. The
reasoning powers all grew silent—the moral faculties
were distorted with the survey; and the feelings were
only so many winged arrows goading him on to evil.
For a time, the guardian conscience—that high standard
of moral education, without which we cease to be
human, and are certainly unhappy—battled stoutly;
and taking the shape of a thought, which told him continually
of his mother, kept back, nervously restless,
the hand which clutched the knife. But the fierce
passions grew triumphant, with the utterance of a
single name from the lips of Harrison,—that of Bess,
—linked with the tenderest epithets of affection.
With a fierce fury as he heard it, Grayson sprung forth
from the tree, and his form went heavily down upon
the breast of the prostrate man.

“Ha! assassin, what art thou?” and he struggled
manfully with the assailant, “wherefore—what wouldst
thou?—speak!”

“Thy blood—thy blood!” was the only answer, as
the knife was uplifted.

“Horrible! but thou wilt fight for it, murderer,” was
the reply of Harrison, while, struggling with prodigious
effort, though at great disadvantage from the
close-pressed form of Grayson, whose knee was upon
his breast, he strove with one hand, at the same moment
to free his own knife from its place in his bosom,
while aiming to ward off with the other the stroke of
his enemy. The whole affair had been so sudden, so
perfectly unlooked-for by Harrison, who, not yet in
the Indian country, had not expected danger, that he
could not but conceive that the assailant had mistaken

him for another. In the moment, therefore, he appealed
to him.

“Thou hast erred, stranger. I am not he thou
seekest.”

“Thou liest,” was the grim response of Grayson.

“Ha! who art thou?”

“Thy enemy—in life, in death, through the past,
and for the long future, though it be endless,—still
thine enemy. I hate—I will destroy thee. Thou
hast lain in my path—thou hast darkened my hope—
thou hast doomed me to eternal wo. Shalt thou have
what thou hast denied me? Shalt thou live to win
where I have lost? No—I have thee. There is no
aid for thee. In another moment, and I am revenged.
Die—die like a dog, since thou hast doomed me to
live, and to feel like one. Die!”

The uplifted eyes of Harrison beheld the blade
descending in the strong grasp of his enemy. One
more effort, one last struggle, for the true mind never
yields. While reason lasts, hope lives, for the natural
ally of human reason is hope. But he struggled in
vain. The hold taken by his assailant was unrelaxing—that
of iron; and the thoughts of Harrison,
though still he struggled, were strangely mingling
with the prayer, and the sweet dream of a passion,
now about to be defrauded of its joys for ever—but,
just at the moment when he had given himself up as
utterly lost, the grasp of his foe was withdrawn. The
criminal had relented—the guardian conscience had
resumed her sway in time for the safety of both the
destroyer and his victim. And what a revulsion of
feeling and of sense! How terrible is passion—how
terrible in its approach—how more terrible in its passage
and departure! The fierce madman, a moment
before ready to drink a goblet-draught from the heart
of his enemy, now trembled before him, like a leaf
half detached by the frost, and yielding at the first
breathings of the approaching zephyr. Staggering
back as if himself struck with the sudden shaft of
death, Grayson sunk against the tree from which he

had sprung in his first assault, and covered his hands
in agony. His breast heaved like a wave of the ocean
when the winds gather in their desperate frolic over
its always sleepless bosom; and his whole frame was
rocked to and fro, with the moral convulsions of his
spirit. Harrison rose to his feet the moment he had
been released, and with a curiosity not unmingled with
caution, approached the unhappy man.

“What! Master Hugh Grayson!” he exclaimed
naturally enough, as he found out who he was, “what
has tempted thee to this madness—wherefore?”

“Ask me not—ask me not—in mercy, ask me not.
Thou art safe, thou art safe. I have not thy blood
upon my hands; thank God for that. It was her
blessing that saved thee—that saved me; oh, mother,
how I thank thee for that blessing. It took the madness
from my spirit in the moment when I would have
struck thee, Harrison, even with as fell a joy as the
Indian strikes in battle. Go—thou art safe.—Leave
me, I pray thee. Leave me to my own dreadful
thought—the thought which hates, and would just now
have destroyed thee.”

“But wherefore that thought, Master Grayson?
Thou art but young to have such thoughts, and shouldst
take counsel—and why such should be thy thoughts
of me, I would know from thy own lips, which have
already said so much that is strange and unwelcome.”

“Strange, dost thou say,” exclaimed the youth with
a wild grin, “not strange—not strange. But go—go—
leave me, lest the dreadful passion come back. Thou
didst wrong me—thou hast done me the worst of
wrongs, though, perchance, thou knowest it not. But
it is over now—thou art safe. I ask thee not to forgive,
but if thou wouldst serve me, Master Harrison—”

“Speak!” said the other, as the youth paused.

“If thou wouldst serve me,—think me thy foe, thy
deadly foe; one waiting and in mood to slay, and so
thinking, as one bound to preserve himself at all hazard,
use thy knife upon my bosom now, as I would

have used mine upon thee. Strike, if thou wouldst
serve me.” And he dashed his hand upon the bared
breast violently as he spoke.

“Thou art mad, Master Grayson,—to ask of me to
do such folly. Hear me but a while”—

But the other heard him not,—he muttered to himself
half incoherent words and sentences.

“First suicide—miserable wretch,—and then, God
of Heaven! that I should have been so nigh to murder,”
and he sobbed like a child before the man he had
striven to slay, until pity had completely taken the
place of every other feeling in the bosom of Harrison.
At that moment the waving of a torch-light appeared
through the woods at a little distance. The criminal
started as if in terror, and was about to fly from the
spot, but Harrison interposed and prevented him.

“Stay, Master Grayson—go not. The light comes
in the hands of thy brother, who is to put me across
the river. Thou wilt return with him, and may thy
mood grow gentler, and thy thoughts wiser. Thou
hast been rash and foolish, but I mistake not thy nature,
which I hold meant for better things.—I regard
it not, therefore, to thy harm; and to keep thee from
a thought which will trouble thee more than it can
harm me now, I will crave of thee to lend all thy aid
to assist thy mother from her present habitation, as
she has agreed, upon the advice of thy brother and
myself. Thou wast not so minded this morning, so
thy brother assured me; but thou wilt take my word
for it that the remove has grown essential to her safety.
Walter will tell thee all. In the meanwhile, what has
passed between us we hold to ourselves; and if, as
thou hast said, thou hast had wrong at my hands, thou
shalt have right at thy quest, when other duties will
allow.”

“Enough, enough!” cried the youth in a low tone
impatiently, as he beheld his brother, carrying a torch,
emerge from the cover.

“How now, Master Walter—thou hast been sluggard,
and but for thy younger brother, whom I find a

pleasant gentleman, I should have worn out good-humour
in seeking for patience.”

“What, Hugh here!” Walter exclaimed, regarding
his brother with some astonishment, as he well knew
the dislike in which he held Harrison.

“Ay,” said the latter, “and he has grown more reasonable
since morning, and is now,—if I so understand
him—not unwilling to give aid in thy mother's remove.
But come—let us away—we have no time for the fire.
Of the horse, thy brother will take charge—keep him
not here for me, but let him bear thy mother to the
Block House. She will find him gentle. And now,
Master Grayson—farewell! I hope to know thee better
on my return, as I desire thou shalt know me.
Come.”

Concealed in the umbrage of the depending shrubbery,
a canoe lay at the water's edge, into which Harrison
leaped, followed by the elder Grayson. They
were soon off—the skiff, like a fairy bark, gliding
almost noiselessly across that Indian river. Watching
their progress for a while, Hugh Grayson lingered,
until the skiff became a speck, then, with strangely
mingled feelings of humiliation and satisfaction, leaping
upon the steed which had been given him in
charge, he took his way to the dwelling of his mother.