FullReads

Then she thought of the Great Deliverance, when he drew her up out of many waters, and the flashing old psalm pealed forth triumphantly:–

“The lord descended from above,
and bow’d the heavens hie:
And underneath his feet he cast
the darknesse of the skie.
On cherubs and on cherubins
full royally he road:
And on the wings of all the winds
came flying all abroad.”

She forgot how recently, and with what a strange pity for her own shapeless form that was to be, she had quaintly sung,–

“Oh, lovely appearance of death!
What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare!”

She remembered instead,–“In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore. God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me. He will swallowup death in victory.”Not once now did she say, “Lord, how long wilt thou look on?rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions,”–for she knew that the young lions roar after their prey and seek their meat from God.”O Lord, thou preservest man and beast!” she said.

She had no comfort or consolation in this season, such as sustained the Christian martyrs in the amphitheatre. She was not dying for her faith; there were no palms in heaven for her to wave; but how many a time had she declared,–“I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness!”And as the broad rays here and there broke through the dense covert of shade and lay in rivers of lustre on crystal sheathing and frozen fretting of trunk and limb and on the great spaces of refraction, they builded up visibly that house, the shining city on the hill, and singing, “Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, on the sides of the North, the city of the Great King,” her vision climbed to that higher picture where the angel shows the dazzling thing, the holy Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God, with its splendid battlements and gates of pearls, and its foundations, the eleventh a jacinth, the twelfth an amethyst,–with its great white throne, and the rainbow round about it, in sight like unto an emerald: “And there shall be no night there,–for the Lord God giveth them light,” she sang.

What whisper of dawn now rustled through the wilderness?How the night was passing!And still the beast crouched upon the bough, changing only the posture of his head, that again he might command her with those charmed eyes;–half their fire was gone; she could almost have released herself from his custody; yet, had she stirred, no one knows what malevolent instinct might have dominated anew. But of that she did not dream; long ago stripped of any expectation, she was experiencing in her divine rapture how mystically true it is that “he that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”

Slow clarion cries now wound from the distance as the cocks caught the intelligence of day and re-echoed it faintly from farm to farm,–sleepy sentinels of night, sounding the foe’s invasion, and translating that dim intuition to ringing notes of warning. Still she chanted on. A remote crash of brushwood told of some other beast on his depredations, or some night-belated traveller groping his way through the narrow path. Still she chanted on. The far, faint echoes of the chanticleers died into distance,–the crashing of the branches grew nearer. No wild beast that, but a man’s step,–a man’s form in the moonlight, stalwart and strong,–on one arm slept a little child, in the other hand he held his gun. Still she chanted on.

Perhaps, when her husband last looked forth, he was half ashamed to find what a fear he felt for her. He knew she would never leave the child so long but for some direst need,–and yet he may have laughed at himself, as he lifted and wrapped it with awkward care, and, loading his gun and strapping on his horn, opened the door again and closed it behind him,
going out and plunging into the darkness and dangers of the forest. He was more singularly alarmed than he would have been willing to acknowledge; as he had sat with his bow hovering over the strings, he had half believed to hear her voice mingling gayly with the instrument, till he paused and listened if she were not about to lift the latch and enter. As he drew nearer the heart of the forest, that intimation of melody seemed to grow more actual, to take body and breath, to come and go on long swells and ebbs of the night-breeze, to increase with tune and words, till a strange shrill singing grew ever clearer, and, as he stepped into an open space of moonbeams, far up in the branches, rocked by the wind, and singing, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace,” he saw his wife,–his wife,–but, great God in heaven! how? Some mad exclamation escaped him, but without diverting her. The child knew the singing voice, though never heard before in that unearthly key, and turned toward it through the veiling dreams. With a celerity almost instantaneous, it lay, in the twinkling of an eye, on the ground at the father’s feet, while his gun was raised to his shoulder and levelled at the monster covering his wife with shaggy form and flaming gaze,–his wife so ghastly white, so rigid, so stained with blood, her eyes so fixedly bent above, and her lips, that had indurated into the chiselled pallor of marble, parted only with that flood of solemn song.