“Mine is an eternal love,
Higher than the heights above,
Deeper than the depths beneath,
True and faithful — strong as death.
“Thou shalt see my glory soon,
When the work of faith is done;
Partner of my throne shalt be!
Say, poor sinner, lov’st thou me?”
Oh, love of Christ! which no sin can weary, which no lapse of time can change; from which tribulation, persecution, and distress cannot separate — all-redeeming, all-glorifying, changing even death and despair to the gate of heaven! Thou hast one more triumph here in the wilderness, in the slave-coffle, and thou comest to bind up the broken hearted.
As the song ceased, she opened her eyes.
“Mother used to sing that!” she said.
“And can you believe in it, daughter?”
“Yes,” she said, “I see Him now! He loves me! Let me go!”
There followed a few moments of those stragglings and shiverings which are the birth-pangs of another life, and Emily lay at rest.
Father Dickson, kneeling by her side, poured out the fullness of his heart in an earnest prayer. Rising, he went up to the trader, and taking his hand, said to him, —
“My friend, this may be the turning-point with your soul for eternity. It has pleased the Lord to show you the evil of your ways; and now my advice to you is, break off your sins at once, and do works meet for repentance. Take off the shackles of these poor creatures, and tell them they are at liberty to go.”
“Why, bless your soul, sir, this yer lot’s worth ten thousand dollars!” said the trader, who was not prepared for so close a practical application.
Do not be too sure, friend, that the trader is peculiar in this. The very same argument, though less frankly stated, holds in the bonds of Satan many extremely well-bred, refined, respectable men, who would gladly save their souls if they could afford the luxury.
“My friend,” said Father Dickson, using the words of a very close and uncompromising preacher of old, “what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul!”
“I know that,” said the trader doubtfully; “but it’s a very hard case, this. I’ll think about it, though. But there’s Father Bonnie wants to buy Nance. It would be a pity to disappoint him. But I’ll think it over.”
Father Dickson returned to the camp-ground between one and two o’clock at night, and putting away his horse, took his way to the ministers’ tent. Here he found Father Bonnie standing out in the moonlight. He had been asleep within the tent; but it is to be confessed that the interior of a crowded tent on a camp-ground is anything but favorable to repose. He therefore came out into the fresh air, and was there when Father Dickson came back to enter the tent.
“Well, brother, where have you been so late?” said Father Bonnie.
“I have been looking for a few sheep in the wilderness, whom everybody neglects,” said Father Dickson. And then, in a tone tremulous from agitation, he related to him the scene he had just witnessed.
“Do you see,” he said, “brother, what iniquities you are countenancing? Now here, right next to our camp, a slave-coffle encamped! Men and women, guilty of no crime, driven in fetters through our land, shaming us in the sight of every Christian nation! What horrible, abominable iniquities are these poor traders tempted to commit! What perfect hells are the great trading-houses, where men, women, and children are made merchandise of, and where no light of the gospel ever enters! And when this poor trader is convicted of sin, and wants to enter into the kingdom, you stand there to apologize for his sins! Brother Bonnie, I much fear you are the stumbling-block over which souls will stumble into hell. I don’t think you believe your argument from the Old Testament, yourself. You must see that it has no kind of relation to such kind of slavery as we have in this country. There’s an awful Scripture which saith: ‘He feedeth on ashes; a deceived heart hath turned him aside, so that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?’”
The earnestness with which Father Dickson spoke, combined with the reverence commonly entertained for his piety, gave great force to his words. The reader will not therefore wonder to hear that Father Bonnie, impulsive and easily moved as he was, wept at the account, and was moved by the exhortation. Nor will he be surprised to learn that, two weeks after, Father Bonnie drove a brisk bargain with the same trader for three new hands.
The trader had discovered that the judgment-day was not coming yet a while; and Father Bonnie satisfied himself that Noah, when he awoke from his wine, said, “Cursed be Canaan.”
We have one scene more to draw before we dismiss the auditors of the camp-meeting.
At a late hour the Gordon carriage was winding its way under the silent, checkered, woodland path. Harry, who came slowly on a horse behind, felt a hand laid on his bridle. With a sudden start, he stopped. “Oh, Dred, is it you? How dared you — how could you be so imprudent? How dared you come here, when you know you risk your life?”
“Life!” said the other, “what is life? He that loveth his life shall lose it. Besides, the Lord said unto me, Go! The Lord is with me as a mighty and terrible one! Harry, did you mark those men? Hunters of men, their hands red with the blood of the poor, all seeking unto the Lord! Ministers who buy and sell us! Is this a people prepared for the Lord? I left a man dead in the swamps, whom their dogs have torn! His wife is a widow — his children, orphans! They eat and wipe their mouth, and say, ‘What have I done?’ The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, are we!”
“I know it,” said Harry gloomily.
“And you join yourself unto them?”
“Don’t speak to me any more about that! I won’t betray you, but I won’t consent to have blood shed. My mistress is my sister.”
“Oh yes, to be sure! They read Scripture, don’t they? Cast out the children of the bondwoman! That’s Scripture for them!”
“Dred,” said Harry, “I love her better than I love myself. I will fight for her to the last, but never against her, nor hers!”
“And you will serve Tom Gordon?” said Dred.
“Never!” said Harry.
Dred stood still a moment. Through an opening among the branches the moonbeams streamed down on his wild, dark figure. Harry remarked his eye fixed before him on vacancy, the pupil swelling out in glassy fullness, with a fixed, somnambulic stare. After a moment, he spoke, in a hollow, altered voice, like that of a sleep-walker: —
“Then shall the silver cord be loosed, and the golden bowl be broken. Yes, cover up the grave — cover it up! Now, hurry! come to me, or he will take thy wife for a prey!”
“Dred, what do you mean?” said Harry. “What’s the matter?” He shook him by the shoulder.
Dred rubbed his eyes, and stared on Harry.
“I must go back,” he said, “to my den. ‘Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests,’ and in the habitation of dragons the Lord hath opened a way for his outcasts!”
He plunged into the thickets, and was gone.
CHAPTER XXIV
LIFE IN THE SWAMPS
OUR readers will perhaps feel an interest to turn back with us, and follow the singular wanderings of the mysterious personage, whose wild denunciations had so disturbed the minds of the worshipers at the camp-meeting.
There is a twilight-ground between the boundaries of the sane and insane, which the old Greeks and Romans regarded with a peculiar veneration. They held a person whose faculties were thus darkened as walking under the awful shadow of a supernatural presence; and as the mysterious secrets of the stars only become visible in the night, so in these eclipses of the more material faculties they held there was often an awakening of supernatural perceptions.
The hot and positive light of our modern materialism, which exhales from the growth of our existence every dewdrop, which searches out and dries every rivulet of romance, which sends an unsparing beam into every cool grotto of poetic possibili
ty, withering the moss, and turning the dropping cave to a dusty den — this spirit, so remorseless, allows us no such indefinite land. There are but two words in the whole department of modern anthropology — the sane and the insane; the latter dismissed from human reckoning almost with contempt. We should find it difficult to give a suitable name to the strange and abnormal condition in which this singular being, of whom we are speaking, passed the most of his time. It was a state of exaltation and trance, which yet appeared not at all to impede the exercise of his outward and physical faculties, but rather to give them a preternatural keenness and intensity, such as sometimes attends the more completely developed phenomena of somnambulism.
In regard to his physical system there was also much that was peculiar. Our readers may imagine a human body of the largest and keenest vitality to grow up so completely under the nursing influences of nature, that it may seem to be as perfectly en rapport with them as a tree; so that the rain, the wind, and the thunder, all those forces from which human beings generally seek shelter, seem to hold with it a kind of fellowship, and to be familiar companions of existence.
Such was the case with Dred. So completely had he come into sympathy and communion with nature, and with those forms of it which more particularly surrounded him in the swamps, that he moved about among them with as much ease as a lady treads her Turkey carpet. What would seem to us in recital to be incredible hardship was to him but an ordinary condition of existence. To walk knee-deep in the spongy soil of the swamp, to force his way through thickets, to lie all night sinking in the porous soil, or to crouch, like the alligator, among reeds and rushes, were to him situations of as much comfort as well-curtained beds and pillows are to us.
It is not to be denied, that there is in this savage perfection of the natural organs a keen and almost fierce delight, which must excel the softest seductions of luxury. Anybody who has ever watched the eager zest with which the hunting-dog plunges through the woods, darts through the thicket, or dives into water, in an ecstasy of enjoyment, sees something of what such vital force must be.
Dred was under the inspiring belief that he was the subject of visions and supernatural communications. The African race are said by mesmerists to possess, in the fullest degree, that peculiar temperament which fits them for the evolution of mesmeric phenomena; and hence the existence among them, to this day, of men and women who are supposed to have peculiar magical powers. The grandfather of Dred, on his mother’s side, had been one of these reputed African sorcerers, and he had early discovered in the boy this peculiar species of temperament. He had taught him the secret of snake-charming, and had possessed his mind from childhood with expectations of prophetic and supernatural impulses. That mysterious and singular gift, whatever it may be, which Highland seers denominate second sight, is a very common tradition among the negroes; and there are not wanting thousands of reputed instances among them to confirm belief in it. What this faculty may be, we shall not pretend to say. Whether there be in the soul a yet undeveloped attribute, which is to be to the future what memory is to the past, or whether in some individuals an extremely high and perfect condition of the sensuous organization endows them with something of that certainty of instinctive discrimination which belongs to animals, are things which we shall not venture to decide upon.
It was, however, an absolute fact with regard to Dred, that he had often escaped danger by means of a peculiarity of this kind. He had been warned from particular places where the hunters had lain in wait for him; had foreseen in times of want where game might be ensnared, and received intimations where persons were to be found in whom he might safely confide; and his predictions with regard to persons and things had often chanced to be so strikingly true, as to invest his sayings with a singular awe and importance among his associates.
It was a remarkable fact, but one not peculiar to this case alone, that the mysterious exaltation of mind in this individual seemed to run parallel with the current of shrewd, practical sense; and like a man who converses alternately in two languages, he would speak now the language of exaltation, and now that of common life, interchangeably. This peculiarity imparted a singular and grotesque effect to his whole personality.
On the night of the camp-meeting, he was, as we have already seen, in a state of the highest ecstasy. The wanton murder of his associate seemed to flood his soul with an awful tide of emotion, as a thundercloud is filled and shaken by slow-gathering electricity. And although the distance from his retreat to the camp-ground was nearly fifteen miles, most of it through what seemed to be impassable swamps, yet he performed it with as little consciousness of fatigue as if he had been a spirit. Even had he been perceived at that time, it is probable that he could no more have been taken, or bound, than the demoniac of Gadara.
After he parted from Harry he pursued his way to the interior of the swamp, as was his usual habit, repeating to himself, in a chanting voice, such words of prophetic writ as were familiar to him.
The day had been sultry, and it was now an hour or two past midnight, when a thunderstorm, which had long been gathering and muttering in the distant sky, began to develop its forces. A low, shivering sigh crept through the woods, and swayed in weird whistlings the tops of the pines; and sharp arrows of lightning came glittering down among the darkness of the branches, as if sent from the bow of some warlike angel. An army of heavy clouds swept in a moment across the moon; then came a broad, dazzling, blinding sheet of flame, concentrating itself on the top of a tall pine near where Dred was standing, and in a moment shivered all its branches to the ground, as a child strips the leaves from a twig. Dred clapped his hands with a fierce delight; and while the rain and wind were howling and hissing around him, he shouted aloud: —
“Wake, O arm of the Lord! Awake, put on thy strength! The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars — yea, the cedars of Lebanon! The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire! The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh! Hailstones and coals of fire!”
The storm, which howled around him, bent the forest like a reed, and large trees, uprooted from the spongy and tremulous soil, fell crashing with a tremendous noise; but as if he had been a dark spirit of the tempest, he shouted and exulted.
The perception of such awful power seemed to animate him, and yet to excite in his soul an impatience that He whose power was so infinite did not awake to judgment.
“Rend the heavens,” he cried, “and come down! Avenge the innocent blood! Cast forth thine arrows, and slay them! Shoot out thy lightnings, and destroy them!”
His soul seemed to kindle with almost a fierce impatience, at the toleration of that Almighty Being, who, having the power to blast and to burn, so silently endures. Could Dred have possessed himself of those lightnings, what would have stood before him? But his cry, like the cry of thousands, only went up to stand in waiting till an awful coming day!
Gradually the storm passed by; the big drops dashed less and less frequently; a softer breeze passed through the forest, with a patter like the clapping of a thousand little wings; and the moon occasionally looked over the silvery battlements of the great clouds.
As Dred was starting to go forward, one of these clear revealings showed him the cowering form of a man, crouched at the root of a tree, a few paces in front of him. He was evidently a fugitive, and, in fact, was the one of whose escape to the swamps the Georgia trader had complained of the day of the meeting.
“Who is here, at this time of night?” said Dred, coming up to him.
“I have lost my way,” said the other. “I don’t know where I am!”
“A runaway?” inquired Dred.
“Don’t betray me!” said the other apprehensively. “Betray you! Would I do that?” said Dred. “How did you get into the swamp?”
“I got away from a soul-driver’s camp, that was taking us on through the states.”
“Oh, oh!” said Dred. “Camp-meeting and driver’s camp right alongside of each other! Shepherds that sell the flock, an
d pick the bones! Well, come, old man; I’ll take you home with me.”
“I’m pretty much beat out,” said the man. “It’s been up over my knees every step; and I didn’t know but they’d set the dogs after me. If they do, I’ll let ’em kill me, and done with it, for I’m ‘bout ready to have it over with. I got free once, and got clear up to New York, and got me a little bit of a house, and a wife and two children, with a little money beforehand; and then they nabbed me, and sent me back again, and mas’r sold me to the drivers, — and I believe I’s ‘bout as good’s die. There’s no use in trying to live — everything going agin a body so!”
“Die! No, indeed, you won’t,” said Dred; “not if I’ve got hold of you! Take heart, man, take heart! Before morning I’ll put you where the dogs can’t find you, nor anything else. Come, up with you!”
The man rose up, and made an effort to follow; but wearied, and unused as he was to the choked and perplexed way, he stumbled and fell almost every minute. “How now, brother?” said Dred. “This won’t do!
I must put you over my shoulder as I have many a buck before now!” And suiting the action to the word, he put the man on his back, and bidding him hold fast to him, went on, picking his way as if he scarcely perceived his weight.
It was now between two and three o’clock, and the clouds, gradually dispersing, allowed the full light of the moon to slide down here and there through the wet and shivering foliage. No sound was heard, save “the humming of insects and the crackling plunges by which Dred made his way forward.
“You must be pretty strong!” said his companion. “Have you been in the swamps long?”
“Yes,” said the other, “I have been a wild man — every man’s hand against me — a companion of the dragons and the owls, this many a year. I have made my bed with the leviathan, among the reeds and the rushes. I have found the alligators and the snakes better neighbors than Christians. They let those alone that let them alone; but Christians will hunt for the precious life.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 94
