Mosses from an old manse
a selfish man, and he could no longer love deeply except where he saw
or imagined some reflection or likeness of his own mind. In Cyrus he
recognized what he had himself been in other days; and at intervals he
seemed to partake of the boy’s spirit, and to be revived with a fresh
and happy life. Reuben was accompanied by his son in the expedition,
for the purpose of selecting a tract of land and felling and burning
the timber, which necessarily preceded the removal of the household
gods. Two months of autumn were thus occupied, after which Reuben
Bourne and his young hunter returned to spend their last winter in the
settlements.
It was early in the month of May that the little family snapped asunder
whatever tendrils of affections had clung to inanimate objects, and
bade farewell to the few who, in the blight of fortune, called
themselves their friends. The sadness of the parting moment had, to
each of the pilgrims, its peculiar alleviations. Reuben, a moody man,
and misanthropic because unhappy, strode onward with his usual stern
brow and downcast eye, feeling few regrets and disdaining to
acknowledge any. Dorcas, while she wept abundantly over the broken ties
by which her simple and affectionate nature had bound itself to
everything, felt that the inhabitants of her inmost heart moved on with
her, and that all else would be supplied wherever she might go. And the
boy dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and thought of the adventurous
pleasures of the untrodden forest.
Oh, who, in the enthusiasm of a daydream, has not wished that he were a
wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle
being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth his free and exulting step
would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topped
mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home where Nature had strewn a
double wealth in the vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary
age, after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him
there, it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a
people, the founder of a mighty nation yet to be. When death, like the
sweet sleep which we welcome after a day of happiness, came over him,
his far descendants would mourn over the venerated dust. Enveloped by
tradition in mysterious attributes, the men of future generations would
call him godlike; and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly
glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries.
The tangled and gloomy forest through which the personages of my tale
were wandering differed widely from the dreamer’s land of fantasy; yet
there was something in their way of life that Nature asserted as her
own, and the gnawing cares which went with them from the world were all
that now obstructed their happiness. One stout and shaggy steed, the
bearer of all their wealth, did not shrink from the added weight of
Dorcas; although her hardy breeding sustained her, during the latter
part of each day’s journey, by her husband’s side. Reuben and his son,
their muskets on their shoulders and their axes slung behind them, kept
an unwearied pace, each watching with a hunter’s eye for the game that
supplied their food. When hunger bade, they halted and prepared their
meal on the bank of some unpolluted forest brook, which, as they knelt
down with thirsty lips to drink, murmured a sweet unwillingness, like a
maiden at love’s first kiss. They slept beneath a hut of branches, and
awoke at peep of light refreshed for the toils of another day. Dorcas
and the boy went on joyously, and even Reuben’s spirit shone at
intervals with an outward gladness; but inwardly there was a cold cold
sorrow, which he compared to the snowdrifts lying deep in the glens and
hollows of the rivulets while the leaves were brightly green above.
Cyrus Bourne was sufficiently skilled in the travel of the woods to
observe that his father did not adhere to the course they had pursued
in their expedition of the preceding autumn. They were now keeping
farther to the north, striking out more directly from the settlements,
and into a region of which savage beasts and savage men were as yet the
sole possessors. The boy sometimes hinted his opinions upon the
subject, and Reuben listened attentively, and once or twice altered the
direction of their march in accordance with his son’s counsel; but,
having so done, he seemed ill at ease. His quick and wandering glances
were sent forward apparently in search of enemies lurking behind the
tree trunks, and, seeing nothing there, he would cast his eyes
backwards as if in fear of some pursuer. Cyrus, perceiving that his
father gradually resumed the old direction, forbore to interfere; nor,
though something began to weigh upon his heart, did his adventurous
nature permit him to regret the increased length and the mystery of
their way.
On the afternoon of the fifth day they halted, and made their simple
encampment nearly an hour before sunset. The face of the country, for
the last few miles, had been diversified by swells of land resembling
huge waves of a petrified sea; and in one of the corresponding hollows,
a wild and romantic spot, had the family reared their hut and kindled
their fire. There is something chilling, and yet heart-warming, in the
thought of these three, united by strong bands of love and insulated
from all that breathe beside. The dark and gloomy pines looked down
upon them, and, as the wind swept through their tops, a pitying sound
was heard in the forest; or did those old trees groan in fear that men
were come to lay the axe to their roots at last? Reuben and his son,
while Dorcas made ready their meal, proposed to wander out in search of
game, of which that day’s march had afforded no supply. The boy,
promising not to quit the vicinity of the encampment, bounded off with
a step as light and elastic as that of the deer he hoped to slay; while
his father, feeling a transient happiness as he gazed after him, was
about to pursue an opposite direction. Dorcas in the meanwhile, had
seated herself near their fire of fallen branches upon the mossgrown
and mouldering trunk of a tree uprooted years before. Her employment,
diversified by an occasional glance at the pot, now beginning to simmer
over the blaze, was the perusal of the current year’s Massachusetts
Almanac, which, with the exception of an old black-letter Bible,
comprised all the literary wealth of the family. None pay a greater
regard to arbitrary divisions of time than those who are excluded from
society; and Dorcas mentioned, as if the information were of
importance, that it was now the twelfth of May. Her husband started.
“The twelfth of May! I should remember it well,” muttered he, while
many thoughts occasioned a momentary confusion in his mind. “Where am
I? Whither am I wandering? Where did I leave him?”
Dorcas, too well accustomed to her husband’s wayward moods to note any
peculiarity of demeanor, now laid aside the almanac and addressed him
in that mournful tone which the tender hearted appropriate to griefs
long cold and dead.
“It was near this time of the month, eighteen years ago, that my poor
father left this world for a better. He had a kind arm to hold his head
and a kind voice to cheer him, Reuben, in his last moments; and the
thought of the faithful care you took of him has comforted me many a
time since. Oh, death would have been awful to a solitary man in a wild
place like this!”
“Pray Heaven, Dorcas,” said Reuben, in a broken voice,—“pray Heaven
that neither of us three dies solitary and lies unburied in this
howling wilderness!” And he hastened away, leaving her to watch the
fire beneath the gloomy pines.
Reuben Bourne’s rapid pace gradually slackened as the pang,
unintentionally inflicted by the words of Dorcas, became less acute.
Many strange reflections, however, thronged upon him; and, straying
onward rather like a sleep walker than a hunter, it was attributable to
no care of his own that his devious course kept him in the vicinity of
the encampment. His steps were imperceptibly led almost in a circle;
nor did he observe that he was on the verge of a tract of land heavily
timbered, but not with pine-trees. The place of the latter was here
supplied by oaks and other of the harder woods; and around their roots
clustered a dense and bushy under-growth, leaving, however, barren
spaces between the trees, thick strewn with withered leaves. Whenever
the rustling of the branches or the creaking of the trunks made a
sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber, Reuben instinctively
raised the musket that rested on his arm, and cast a quick, sharp
glance on every side; but, convinced by a partial observation that no
animal was near, he would again give himself up to his thoughts. He was
musing on the strange influence that had led him away from his
premeditated course, and so far into the depths of the wilderness.
Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives
lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him
onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat. He
trusted that it was Heaven’s intent to afford him an opportunity of
expiating his sin; he hoped that he might find the bones so long
unburied; and that, having laid the earth over them, peace would throw
its sunlight into the sepulchre of his heart. From these thoughts he
was aroused by a rustling in the forest at some distance from the spot
to which he had wandered. Perceiving the motion of some object behind a
thick veil of undergrowth, he fired, with the instinct of a hunter and
the aim of a practised marksman. A low moan, which told his success,
and by which even animals cars express their dying agony, was unheeded
by Reuben Bourne. What were the recollections now breaking upon him?
The thicket into which Reuben had fired was near the summit of a swell
of land, and was clustered around the base of a rock, which, in the
shape and smoothness of one of its surfaces, was not unlike a gigantic
gravestone. As if reflected in a mirror, its likeness was in Reuben’s
memory. He even recognized the veins which seemed to form an
inscription in forgotten characters: everything remained the same,
except that a thick covert of bushes shrouded the lowerpart of the
rock, and would have hidden Roger Malvin had he still been sitting
there. Yet in the next moment Reuben’s eye was caught by another change
that time had effected since he last stood where he was now standing
again behind the earthy roots of the uptorn tree. The sapling to which
he had bound the bloodstained symbol of his vow had increased and
strengthened into an oak, far indeed from its maturity, but with no
mean spread of shadowy branches. There was one singularity observable
in this tree which made Reuben tremble. The middle and lower branches
were in luxuriant life, and an excess of vegetation had fringed the
trunk almost to the ground; but a blight had apparently stricken the
upper part of the oak, and the very topmost bough was withered,
sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered how the little banner had
fluttered on that topmost bough, when it was green and lovely, eighteen
years before. Whose guilt had blasted it?
Dorcas, after the departure of the two hunters, continued her
preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table was the
moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of
which she had spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were left of
the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in the settlements.
It had a strange aspect that one little spot of homely comfort in the
desolate heart of Nature. The sunshine yet lingered upon the higher
branches of the trees that grew on rising ground; but the shadows of
evening had deepened into the hollow where the encampment was made, and