Bart Ridgeley Part 7

"My child! my child! don't say what might have happened. I am glad and grateful--so grateful that he was with you--that he was generous enough to come, after what you said to him; but now, how can we express our grat.i.tude to him?"

"Oh, mamma! I am sure it is no matter. He won't care now what we think."

"You are too much agitated, my daughter, to-night; let us not talk it over now. But what became of Barton? did he come in?"

"No, I left him at the back gate, without a word, only waiting for me to run in. Of course he went back to the woods and wild beasts. What other place was there for him?"

"Don't, don't, Julia! don't say such words. Harm will not come to him."

"I know it won't," said the young girl; "for when the whole world turns against a brave, true heart, G.o.d watches over it with the more care."

"True, my child; and we can at least pray G.o.d to be near him, only don't think of this matter now. In a day or two you will be yourself, and look at it in a different light. Your father will return to-morrow, and it may not be best to tell him of all this at present.

It would only disturb him."

"Yes, mamma; I could not tell him everything as I have told you, and so I must not tell him anything, nor anybody else. How wretched it all is!"

CHAPTER IX.

A DARKENED SOUL.

As Julia left Bart, the full force of her scornful words seemed for the first time to reach him. The great restraint her presence imposed in some way suspended, or broke their effect, and he turned from the gate with a half-uttered moan of anguish. He did not then recall her words or manner; he only realized that, in a cruel and merciless way, she had crushed his heart and soul. It was not long; both recoiled with a sense of wrong and injustice, and utter helplessness, for the hurt came from a woman. Instinctively he returned to the point whence they had emerged when they left the woods, and the thought of the screaming brute came to him with a sense of relief. Here was an object upon which he could wreak himself, and in a half frenzy of madness he hurried towards a spot in the edge of the Slas.h.i.+ng, towards which the cowardly thing had run when it fled from his onset. He paused to listen upon the margin of that tangled wilderness of young trees, briers, and decaying trunks. How solemn and quiet, wild and lonely it was, in the deep night and deeper woods! The solemn hush fell upon the bruised spirit of the youth with the quieting touch and awe of a palpable presence, rebukingly, yet tenderly and pityingly.

Quick to compa.s.sionate others, he had ever been relentless to himself, and refused to regard himself as an object of injustice, or as needing compa.s.sion. As he stood for a moment confronting himself, scorned, despised and humiliated, he felt for himself the measureless contempt to which he seemed to have fallen; yet, under it all, and against it all, he arose. "Oh, Bart! Bart! what a poor, abject, grovelling thing you really are," he said bitterly, "when the word of a girl so overcomes you! when the slap of her little hand so benumbs and paralyzes you! If you can't put her haunting face from you now, G.o.d can hardly help you. How grand she was, in her rage and scorn! Let me always see her thus!" and he turned back into the old road. Along this he sauntered until his eye met the dull gleam of his rifle-barrel against the old stump where he left it. With a great start, he exclaimed, "Oh, if I could only go back to the moment when I stood here with power to choose, and dream!" It was a momentary weakness, a mere recoil from the wound still so fresh and ragged.

It was still in early evening, with time and life heavy on his hands, when he remembered that the Doctor had sent him word to come to the pond that night. Taking his rifle by the muzzle, and throwing it across his shoulder, he plunged into the woods in a right line for the west sh.o.r.e of the pond, at about its midway.

Through thick woods tangled with underbrush and laced with wild vines, down steep banks, over high hills and rocky precipices, across clearings and hairy brier patches, he took his way, and found relief in the physical exertions of which he was still capable. At last he stood on the margin of the forest and hill-embosomed waters of that lovely little lake. It was solitary and silent, but for the weird sounds of night birds and aquatic animals that frequented its reedy margin, and a soft, silvery mist was just rising from its unruffled surface, that gathered in a translucent veil against the dark forest of the opposite sh.o.r.e. Its simple, serene and quiet beauty, under the stars and rising moon, was not lost upon the poetic nature of Barton, still heaving with the recent storm.

He ran his eye along the surface of the water, and discerned in the shadow of the wood, near the island, a fourth of a mile distant, a light, and below it the dark form of a boat. Placing his closed hands to his lips, he blew a strong, clear, full whistle, with one or two notes, and was answered by Theodore. At the landing near him was a half-rotten canoe, partially filled with water, and near it was an old paddle. Without a moment's thought, Barton pushed it into deep water, springing into it as it glided away. He had not pa.s.sed half the distance to the other boat, when he discovered that it was filling.

With his usual rashness, he determined to reach his friends in it by his own exertions, and without calling to them for aid, and by an almost superhuman effort he drove on with his treacherous craft. The ultimate danger was not much to a light and powerful swimmer, and he plunged forward. The noise and commotion of forcing his waterlogged canoe through the water attracted the attention of the party he was approaching, but who had hardly appreciated his situation as he lightly sprang from his nearly filled boat into their midst.

"Hullo, Bart! Why under the heavens did you risk that old log? Why didn't you call to us to meet you?"

"Because," said Bart, excited by his effort and danger, "because to myself I staked all my future on reaching you in that old hulk, and I won. Had it sunk, I had made up my mind to go with her, and, like Mr.

Mantalini, in d.i.c.kens's last novel, 'become a body, a demnition moist unpleasant body.'"

"What old wreck is it?" inquired Young, looking at the scarcely perceptible craft that was sinking near them.

"It is the remains of the old canoe made by Thomas Ridgeley, in his day, I think," said Jonah.

"Nothing of the sort," said Bart; "it is the remains of old Bullock's 'gundalow,' that has been sinking and swimming, like old John Adams in the Revolution, these five years past. Don't let me think to-night, Uncle Jonah, that anything from my father's hand came to take me into the depths of this pond."

The craft occupied by the party was a broad, scow-like float, with low sides, steady, and of considerable capacity. At the bow was a raised platform, covered with gravel, on which stood a fire-jack. The crew were lying on the silent water, engaged with their lines, when Bart so unceremoniously joined them. He went forward to a vacant place and lay down in the bottom, declining to take a line.

"What is the matter, Bart?" asked the Doctor.

"I don't know. I've been wandering about in the woods, and I must have met something, or I have lost something,--I don't know which."

"I guess you saw the wolverine," said Theodore.

"I guess I did;" and pretty soon, "Doctor, is this your robe? Let me cover myself with it; I am cold!" and there was something almost plaintive in his voice.

"Let me spread it over you," said the Doctor, with tenderness. "What ails you, Bart? are you ill?"

"If you left your saddle-bags at home, I think I am; if they are here, I am very well. Doctor," he went on, "can a man have half of his faculties shut off and retain the others clear and strong?"

"I don't know,--perhaps so; why?"

"Well, I feel as if one of your astringents had placed its claws on a full half of me and drawn it all into a pucker; and the other half is in some way set free, and I feel clairvoyant."

"What do you think you can see?" asked the Doctor.

"A young man--quite a young man--blindfolded, groping backward in the chambers of his darkened soul, and trying to escape out of it," said Bart.

"What a queer fancy!" said the Doctor.

"He must have an unusually large soul," said Uncle Jonah.

"Every soul is big enough for the man to move in, small as it is,"

said Bart.

"What is your youth doing in his, now?" asked the Doctor.

"He is sitting down, resigned," answered Bart.

"If his soul was dark, why was he blindfolded?" asked the Doctor.

"Well, I don't know. For the same reason that men with eyes think that a blind man cannot see so well in the dark, perhaps," was the answer.

"And see here," looking into the water, "away down here is a beautiful star. There, I can blot it out with my hand! and see, now, how I can shatter it into wavelets of stars, and now break it into a hundred, by merely disturbing the water where I see it, 'like suns.h.i.+ne broken in a rill.' Who knows but it may be the just-arrived light of an old, old star which has just come to us? How easy to climb back on one of these filmy rays, myriads of millions of leagues, home to its source! I will take off the bandage and let the poor boy see it, and climb if he may."

"You are fanciful and metaphysical," said the Doctor. "Euclid has not operated, I fear. Why would you go up to the source of that ray? Would you expect to find G.o.d and heaven there?"

"I should but traverse the smallest portion of G.o.d," said Bart, "and yet how far away He seems just now. Somebody's unshapen hand cuts His light off; and I cannot see Him by looking down, and I haven't the strength to look up."

"How incoherently you talk; after all, suppose that there is no G.o.d, for do your best, it is but a sentiment, a belief without demonstrative proof."

"Oh, Doctor, don't! You are material, and go by lines and angles; cannot you understand that a G.o.d whose existence you would have to prove is no G.o.d at all? that if His works and givings out don't declare and proclaim him, He is a sham? You cannot see and hear, Doctor, when you are in one of your material moods. Look up, if you can see no reflection in the waters below."

"Well, when I look into the revealed heaven, for instance, Bart, I see it peopled with things of the earth, reflected into it from the earth; showing that the whole idea is of the earth--earthy."

"Oh, Doctor! like the poor old Galilean; when he thought it was all up, he went out and dug bait, and started off a-fis.h.i.+ng. You attend to your fis.h.i.+ng, and let me dream. If G.o.d should attempt to reveal Himself to you to-night, which I wouldn't do, He would have to elevate and enlarge and change you to a celestial, so that you could understand Him; or shrink and shrivel Himself to your capacity, and address you on your level, as I do, using the language and imagery of this earth, and you would answer Him as you do me--'It is all of the earth--earthy.' I want to sleep."

The Doctor pondered as if there was a matter for thought in what he had heard, and a little ripple of under-talk ran on about the subjects, the everlasting old, old and eternally new problems that men have dreamed and stumbled over, and always will--which Bart had dreamily spoken of as if they were very familiar to his thoughts, and they spoke of him, and wondered if anything had happened, and pulled their boat to a new position, while the overtaxed youth subsided into fitful slumber. Theodore finally awoke him, and said that they proposed to light up the jack, if he would take the spear, and they would push out to deeper water, and try for ba.s.s. Bart stared about him uncomprehendingly for a moment. "Oh, Theodore, my fis.h.i.+ng days are over! I will never 'wound the gentle bosom of this lake' with fish spear, or gig, or other instrument; and I've backed this old rifle around for the last time to-day."