University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.

Rainsford invited the preacher to a conference,
in which the latter unwittingly, and without
suspecting his object, said all he could to
confirm him in the dark design which had been
conjured up by his discourse of the morning.
With the rash and fervent eloquence of an imagination
almost as heated as that of Rainsford
himself, he declaimed against the moral duties
of this world, and arraigned the gentle ties of
kindred, friendship, and love at the bar of eternal
Omnipotence as impious lusts of the flesh,
hateful to the purity of the immortal soul. He
stigmatized the love of a beautiful and virtuous
woman as one of the secret temptations of the
enemy of man, to lure him from the pursuit of
his everlasting happiness; and denounced the
best affections of the heart as the product of its
rank, incurable corruption. In short, they parted,
leaving the young man a gloomy, thoughtful
visionary, on the high road to the fury of
fanaticism, and alternately the sport of reason
staggering on its throne, of imagination exalted
into madness.

By degrees he came to be fully impressed
with the conviction that the misfortunes of his
family were the ministers of Divine vengeance

for some great offence of his grandfather, and
that the only way in which he could make
atonement, so as to escape their fate and ensure
his future happiness, was to offer a sacrifice of
all his worldly affections on the altar of faith.
After a struggle which increased and accelerated
the natural tendency of his mind towards
a total derangement, he at length convinced
himself that Virginia was the great and fatal
obstacle in the way of his salvation; and that
by making a noble disinterested sacrifice of her,
he would ensure his peace here and hereafter.
A deep, stern gloom succeeded this conviction.
He would sit for hours in one position and one
spot, gazing with vacant look at some object
of which it was apparent he had no distinct
perception; he neglected all the common offices
of life, his dress, his beard, his meals, and his
sleep; and passed the whole day without uttering
a single word in answer to the ten thousand
questions of Mrs. Judith Paddock.

At the end of the third day his eye suddenly
brightened, he started from his seat with a
strange alacrity, and, concealing a dirk in his
bosom, which he had brought with him from
an idea that his journey might expose him to
occasions when it would be necessary, he sank
on his knees, appeared deeply engaged in devotion,
and then walked briskly forth towards the
dwelling of Colonel Dangerfield. Virginia welcomed
him with a melancholy tenderness, and
shuddered at the alteration he had undergone
since last they parted. He invited her to enjoy
an evening walk, and led her on by degrees to
a spot on the river-side which could not be seen

from the house. He desired her to be seated,
and, sitting down by her side, fixed his eyes
intently on her face for some moments, with a
strange expression that, she knew not why,
alarmed her, not for herself, but him.

“Virginia,” at length he said, “dost thou remember
any sins thou hast committed, and not
atoned for?”

“It would be presumptuous in me to say so;
but this I believe I can say, that I have never
sinned without being sorry for what I had
done.”

“I warrant you. I would stake a life ten
thousand times more worth than this ragged
remnant I possess, that thou art as innocent of
all intentional offence to thy fellow-creatures
or their Creator, as was the lamb which the old
patriarch offered up instead of his only son.
Dost thou believe in the efficacy of such sacrifices,
Virginia?”

“I believe that there is a better sacrifice than
this,—that of ourselves, our selfish wishes, and
selfish passions.”

“You say true, you say true,” cried he, eagerly;
“the welfare of the immortal soul, the
interminable duration of eternity, must not be
sacrificed at the shrine of the few short years,
the few miserable enjoyments we can crowd
into them. But to obtain the great blessing for
which all men were created, some victim is necessary,
and that victim must be spotless innocence
itself. The wretched sinner can offer no
atonement for others, for his own transgressions
require all his blood to wash them out. The
harmless lamb or the unsinning virgin can

alone atone for the wickedness of the race of
man; and hence, in the early stages of almost
all religions, calamities were averted or blessings
obtained by the greatest of all testimonies
—greater than the voluntary martyrdom of the
saints—the sacrifice of an Iphigenia, the dearest,
the bitterest proof of full faith in the religion
they professed.”

“But our mild, beneficent religion requires
not these; it requires not to be consecrated by
the shedding of blood.”

“Not consecrated by the shedding of blood!
What think you of the thousands of martyrs
in almost every age and nation? of the innocent
women and babes, the millions of human
sacrifices which bigotry, ambition, avarice,
and revenge, skulking under the mantle
of faith and holiness, have offered up to the
sword or the fire? Virginia! I tell you, Virginia,
that all the enjoyments of this world, all
the bliss of hereafter, is the price of blood!”

The young maiden shuddered at hearing
these gloomy and terrible words, and beholding
the wild expression of his eyes as he uttered
them. She wished herself at home, and was
rising to go, when he hastily exclaimed,—

“Not yet, not quite yet; a few minutes more,
and you shall commence your flight. Come,
kneel down and pray for me, as I will for you.
Heaven knows I want the prayers of all good
people. Come, pray for me, Virginia; wilt
thou?”

They knelt down together, and together their
orisons ascended to the skies. As Rainsford
contemplated her pale and touching face, and

the calm expression of her reverent eye, cast
upwards in the holy abstraction of devotion and
love combined,—for she prayed for him she loved
and pitied,—he thought to himself that now, now
was the time; now that her mind was divested
of all worldly dross, and her soul already halfway
on its flight to heaven. Twice—thrice did
he put his hand into his bosom; thrice he felt
the sharp-pointed weapon; and thrice he shuddered
and snatched his hand away, as if he had
met the fangs of the rattlesnake. Virginia did
not seem to observe him; her spirit appeared
communing with intelligences high seated above
the stars, that now one by one began to twinkle
dimly in various portions of the heavens. When
she was about to rise from the ground, he gently
detained her with a trembling hand.

“Not yet, not quite yet, Virginia; let me look
on you a moment longer.”

She remained still kneeling, and looking in
his face with a tearful eye, so mild, so confiding,
so affectionate, that the wild purpose of his
wayward intellect became every moment more
difficult to execute. Again, however, the dark
thought crossed his mind, which was becoming
every moment more chaotic from the struggles
it was sustaining, that if she lived he should
still love her, and she him, and thus both their
souls would be jeopardized by indulging in
worldly thoughts, worldly enjoyments, and
worldly pursuits, to the neglect of all others.
“We will go to heaven together,” thought he;
and again he put his hand in his bosom; again
he felt and grasped the weapon of death, while
such was his fearful agitation, that Virginia

was overpowered with a feeling of tenderness
and pity. She placed her soft white hand, now
cold with her emotions, against his colder fore
head, damp with the dews of agony, and exclaimed,
in a voice of touching melody,—

“Poor, poor Rainsford!”

He took her hand gently away, and was about
to put it to his lips, when, suddenly letting it
go, he exclaimed,—

“No, I have sworn it, and will not die with
the weight of perjury on my soul! Look, Virginia,
yonder is the evening star, the star of
love's queen, just hiding behind the distant
hills.”

She turned her head to look at the star, and
as she contemplated it a few moments, he
snatched the weapon from his bosom, raised
it, and—

“It is impossible! it is impossible!” he cried
aloud; “my soul shall perish first!” and, rushing
into the adjoining wood, he disappeared,
leaving Virginia to return home by herself; to
ponder and mourn over his wayward eccentricities,
and indulge her despair of ever being
happy with him.

She found, in addition to the family circle,
assembled in the parlour, the wandering preacher,
Mr. Bushfield, and the Black Warrior, who had
come to ask a supply of ammunition from the
colonel, as was his usual custom. The Indians,
however high-minded and independent in other
respects, are, like all mankind in their primitive
state, careless of the rights of property, extremely
avaricious, equally prodigal, and notorious
for asking for every thing. When a chief

introduces a young warrior to a white dignitary
west of the Mississippi, his eulogium is as follows:—“He
is a brave warrior, a great horse-thief,
and very considerable of a beggar.”

The itinerant and the Black Warrior were
talking about the creation of the world, the
former having made a dead set at the latter
with a view of converting him. The truth is,
he was one of those whose well-meant yet ill-timed
zeal intrudes itself everywhere, and on
all occasions. He seemed to think, and no doubt
did persuade himself, that his profession emancipated
him from the rules of propriety and
good breeding which govern all well-bred people.
He had already banished the cheerful hilarity,
the innocent freedom which usually pervaded
the social circle, and caused a restraint that destroyed
all the pleasure of the little party. When
Bushfield dwelt with his usual eloquence on the
pleasures of the chase, the delights of living
alone, and having nobody to stand in your daylight,
he took occasion sternly to reprehend the
sport as interfering with the ceaseless care
which was necessary to the salvation of the
soul. When Colonel Dangerfield spoke to his
son of the charms of eloquence and poetry, the
pleasures attendant on the acquisition of knowledge,
he denounced all these as temptations of
the evil one to detach us from the one thing
needful. When Mrs. Dangerfield happened to
mention the domestic happiness of one of her
friends, and the attachment which subsisted between
the wife and the husband, the children
and their parents, he called all the domestic
affections nothing but carnal lusts of the flesh,

leading us into the flowery paths of temptation.
When the duties a man owes to his country
and his fellow-citizens were insisted on, he
placed patriotism in that class of worldly feelings
which interfere with the more important
interests of the immortal soul; and when Mr.
Littlejohn lauded the delights of luxuriating on
three chairs, he treated him as little better than
one of the wicked. All this was said and done
with an arrogant assumption of superiority, an
air of harsh, uncompromising bigotry, which
answered no other purpose than to make the
most mild, amiable, forgiving, and lenient
faith ever propounded to mankind appear directly
the reverse of what it really is. Nothing
is so unbecoming in a divine as the absence of
humility; for how can he who arrays himself
in the trappings of pride and presumption correct
those vices in the rest of mankind, or enforce
those precepts which his practice every
day belies?

The Black Warrior was sitting near a window,
smoking his pipe, a privilege allowed him
by Mrs. Dangerfield, when the over-zealous man
made a demonstration towards him. The Indian
listened with great gravity and decorum,
as the red men always do to what is said to
them, while he was giving a sketch of the Mosaic
account of the creation of the world, the
deluge, the ark, and the subsiding of the universal
waste of waters. When he had finished,
the Black Warrior waited some minutes to allow
him an opportunity of continuing if he wished,
and then, taking his pipe from his mouth,
gravely replied,—

“You white black-coats tell big lies. Him
you call Adam no first man. My father long
way off first man, and he was named in English
Sour Mush; he father of all my tribe, and not
Adam, as you say. Listen! the Great Spirit
want somebody to live below here, and he say
to my father, `You go down yonder, and make
people.' Well, he set out; at first he go very
well; then, when he got little way farther, he
go too fast, bang! down, down, down,—hardly
fetch breath, he go so fast. Well, by'm-by
come birds, and put their wings under him, and
let him down easy, very easy, and put him
softly on the top of a tree on a high mountain.
Well, he set there one, two, three day, and at
last he grow very hungry, want to eat mighty
much, and he say so to the Great Spirit; and
Great Spirit tell him, `Blow, blow on the waters.'
Well, he blow, blow, blow, till water only up to
his knee down on the prairie. But he say to
the Great Spirit, `May as well be deep like before;
nothing to eat yet, very hungry.' Then
the Great Spirit tell him blow again, and he
send the winds to help him. And he blow,
blow, blow, and the winds come and help him
blow till all the water go away. Then Sour
Mush he come down from the mountain, and
his feet make deep tracks in soft mud; and,
huh! out jump buffalo, deer, elk, and all sorts
of game, and so my father get plenty to eat.
Then Great Spirit in some time send him a
wife, who come right out of a cave in the
ground; and so in a great many moons we
got to be a great nation. Huh! think Indian

don't know who first man as well as white
black-coat?”[1]

The zealous wanderer was “like all wrath,”
as Bushfield said, with the poor Indian, for thus
asserting his ancient belief. He denounced his
tradition as an invention of Satan himself, instead
of viewing it philosophically in the light
of a strong corroboration of the actual occurrence
of that great deluge the dim and vague
traditions of which seem to pervade the earliest
memorials of every people of the earth.