Complete Works of Bram Stoker (55 page)

Towards evening, they picked out a spot for a camp on a little spur of rocky ground overlooking a deep valley. There were here only a few tall pines whose bare and rugged appearance bore witness to their constant exposure. How they ever came to be there was a wonder to Mrs Elstree, till she saw the spring of sweet water which bubbled up close to their roots, and trickling away fell over the precipice into the valley below. The instant the word was given, the preparation for the bivouac began. Some of the Indians took from their ponies the material for a little bell-tent, such as soldiers use, and in what appeared to Esse to be an incredibly short time, had it fixed, pegged down and banked up with earth from a trench which they dug round it. At the same time some of the others had got wood, and lighted a fire over which they had hung the cooking-pot for their evening’s meal. Le Maistre had in the meantime busied himself with his own preparations for dinner. He had lighted a small fire in a circle of loose stones, and placed over it what looked like a square box, which presently began to give out appetising odours. A rough table was formed from a log, and campstools were placed beside it; and before Esse could get over her wonderment at the whole scene, she found that dinner was ready to be served. The evening was now close at hand, and the beauty of the scene arrested the hungry mortals who had the privilege of seeing it. The sun was sinking like a great red globe into the Pacific, and from the great height at which they were, the rays reached them from over a far stretch of the earth below them, now shrouded in the black shadow of the evening. High above and beyond them, when they looked back, the rosy light fell on the snowy top of the mountain, and lit it with a radiance that seemed divine.

And then the sun seemed to pass from them, and they too were hidden in the shadow of the night; but still the light fell on the mountain till the darkness, creeping up, seemed to wipe it out. When the last point of light had faded from the white peak, which the instant after seemed like the ghost of itself, they looked down, and seemed to realise that the night was upon them.

Dinner was waiting them, so as soon as the entire landscape was blotted out, they bethought them of their hunger. By the time they had sat down at the rude table the Indians had lighted some pine branches and stood round holding them as torches.

It was a wonderful sight. The red flare of the burning pine threw up the red trunks of the great pine-trees so that they seemed to tower towards the very skies, until they were lost in distance, and behind them their black shadows seemed to fall into the depths of the valley. Esse felt like some barbaric empress, and could not take her mind off the picturesque and romantic aspect of the whole thing. It seemed a piece of nightmare projection of the present on the past whenever Le Maistre, in the course of the meal, changed his enamelled tin plates, or brought a fresh variety of food from his mysterious box. Mrs Elstree was full of the beauty of the scene; and as she looked at the happiness on her daughter’s face, and noted the quick eagerness which had already taken the place of the habitual languor, she felt a great peace stealing over her, much as sleep creeps over a wearied child.

Esse did not stay longer at the table than was necessary. In the thoughtlessness of her youth she overlooked the fact that the others of the party were hungry, and, only for her mother’s whispered warning, she would at once have joined the group awaiting round the camp fire the completion of the cookery. The Indians sat on one side of the fire and ate their meat half cooked - part of a little deer which Dick had shot, on purpose for the meal, just before sunset. Le Maistre and Dick sat together at the opposite side of the fire, and took their dinner with the larger deliberation of the Caucasian. Still, there were not many courses to be served, and it was not long till both men had got out their pipes and were beginning to enjoy a smoke. The Indians had already lit their corn-cobb pipes, and were in high enjoyment, squatted down close enough to the fire to have begun the cookery of a white man. When Esse saw the puffs of smoke she at once went over to the fire. Le Maistre jumped to his feet and took his pipe from his mouth; but Dick sat still and smoked on. Esse said, as she came close:

‘If you stop smoking I shall go away; and I want to come and ask you things.’ Le Maistre at once sat down and resumed his pipe, and Esse sat on a broken trunk and watched the fire. All the while Miss Gimp was sitting with Mrs Elstree, asking questions as to the best way of finishing a new pattern of crochet which had hitherto baffled her. Esse’s first question to Dick was:

“Why have we chosen this spot to camp in? Suppose a high wind were to come, wouldn’t it blow the tent over the precipice?’

That’s true enough, Little Missy, but there ain’t no high wind a-comin’ up the canon to-night - nothin’ more than the sea-wind which is keepin’ the smoke off this here camp. An’ even if it did come, well, we’ve got fixin’s on to these trees that I reckon’ll see the night through. As to choosin’ this spot, where is there a better? See, we’ve shelter from the big trees, an’ water here to hand, so with a fire across the neck of this rock, and one man to watch it, where’s the harm to come from, and how’s it goin’ to reach us?’

‘I see,’ said Esse, and was silent for a while, taking in and assimilating her first lesson in woodcraft. After a little bit she strolled away to the northern side of the precipice, and stood at the edge, wrapt in the glorious silence. A little way off the great fire, which the Indians had heaped with branches, leaped and threw lurid lights on its own smoke, which, taken by the west wind, seemed to bend over and disappear into the darkness of the valley like falling water. Overhead was the deep dark blue of the night, spangled with stars that seemed through the clear air as if one had only to stretch out a hand to touch them; and high away to the south rose the snow-cap of Shasta gleaming ghostly white.

After a while the silence itself became oppressive, as though the absence of sound were something positive which could touch the nervous system. Esse listened and listened, straining her ears for any sound, and at length the myriad and mystic sounds of the night began to be revealed; the creaking of branches and the whispering rustle of many leaves; the fall of distant water; and now and then the far away sound of some beast of the night began to come through the silence. And so, little by little, the life of the night, which is as ample and multitudinous as the life of the day, had one but knowledge to recognise its voices, became manifest; and as the experience went into Esse’s mind, as it must ever go into the mind of man or woman when it is once realised, the girl to whom the new life was coming felt that she had learned her second lesson in woodcraft.

And so she sat thinking and thinking, weaving from the very fabric of the night such dreams as are ever the elixir of a young maiden’s life, till she forgot where she was, and all about the wonders of the day that had passed, and wandered at will through such starlit ways as the future opened for her.

She was recalled to her surroundings by some subde sense of change around her. The noises of the night and the forest seemed to have ceased. At first she thought that this was because her ears had become accustomed to the sounds; but in a few seconds later she realised the true cause; the moon was rising, and in the growing light the sounds, which up to then had been the only evidence of Nature’s might, became at once of merely ordinary importance. And then, all breathless with delight, Esse, from her high coign of vantage on the brow of the great precipice, saw what looked like a ghostly dawn.

Above the tree-tops, which became articulated from the black mass of a distant hill as the light shone through the rugged edge, sailed slowly the great silver moon. With its coming the whole of Nature seemed to become transformed. The dark limit of forest, where hill and valley were lost in mere expanse, became resolved in some uncertain way into its elements. The pale light fell down great slopes, so that the waves of verdure seemed to roll away from the light and left the depths of the valleys wrapped in velvety black. Hill-tops unthought of rose in points of light, and the great ghostly dome of Shasta seemed to gleam out with a new, silent power.

Esse had begun to lose herself again in this fresh manifestation of Nature’s beauty when her mother’s voice recalled her to herself. She went over to the tent and found her busily engaged with Miss Gimp in arranging matters for the night. The tent was so tiny that there was just room for the three women to lie comfortably on the piles of buffalo and bear rugs which were laid about; and Esse having seen her own corner fixed, went out and stood by the fire where Dick and Le Maistre still sat smoking and talking. She had taken a bearskin robe with her, and this she spread on the ground, near enough to hear the men talk, and sat on it, leaning back on one elbow, and gazed into the fire. She did not feel sleepy; but sleep had been for many a day an almost unknown luxury. For hours every night had she lain awake and heard the clocks chime, and sometimes had seen the dark meet with the dawn, but when sleep had come, it had come unwillingly, with lagging and uncertain step. But for very long she had not known that natural, healthy sleep which comes with silent footstep, and makes no declaration of his intent. The bright firelight flickered over her face, now and again making her instinctively draw back her head as a collapsing branch threw out a fresh access of radiance. And she thought and thought, and her wishes and imaginings became wrought into her strange surroundings. All at once she sat up with sudden impulse as she heard Dick’s voice in tones of startling clearness:

‘Guess Little Missy’s fallen asleep. You’d better tell her mother to get her off to bed!’ With the instinctive obedience of youth and womanhood to the voice of authority she rose, swaying with sleep, and saying good-night passed into the tent. Here she found her mother wrapping herself in her blanket for the night. Esse made her simple toilet, and in a few minutes she too was wrapped in her blanket and was settling down to sleep. Then Miss Gimp put out the dark lantern which was close to her hand, and in a very few minutes, what she would have denied as being a snore, proclaimed that she slept. Mrs Elstree was lying still, and breathed with long, gentle breaths. Esse could not go to sleep at once, but lay awake listening. She heard some sounds as of men moving, but nothing definite enough to help her imagination in trying to follow what was happening outside. She raised herself softly, and unlooping one of the flaps of the tent looked out.

The fire still blazed but with the strong settled redness, that shows that there is a solid base of glowing embers underneath the flame, and round it were stretched several dark figures wrapped in gaily coloured blankets. In the whole camp was only one figure upright) at the neck of the little rocky promontory stood a tall figure leaning on a Winchester rifle, seeming to keep guard over the camp. He was too far off to be touched by the firelight, but the moonlight fell on the outline of his body and showed the long fair hair falling on the shoulders of his embroidered buckskin shirt. When he turned she could see the keen eagle eyes looking out watchfully.

Esse crept back to her bed, and, with a contented sigh, fell asleep.

CHAPTER 2

Esse became awake all at once, and, throwing off the buffalo robe which covered her, opened the flap of the tent and looked out. Over everything was the cold light of the coming dawn. The Indians were moving about and piling up again the fire, which was beginning to answer their attention with spluttering crackles, and Grizzly Dick was blowing a tin mug of steaming coffee which Le Maistre had just handed to him. Esse hurried her toilet in a manner which would have filled Miss Gimp with indignant concern, had she been awake, and stole out of the tent. She went over to the eastern side of the plateau, and stood there, looking expectantly for the coming dawn. It was something of a shock when Dick handed to her a mug of hot coffee saying:

‘Catch hold! Guess, Little Missy, ye’d better rastle this or the cold of the morning’ll get ye, sure!’ She took the coffee, and, although at first she felt it a sort of sacrilege to superadd the enjoyment of its consumption to the more ethereal pleasure of the sea of beauty around her, was glad a moment later for the physical comfort which it gave her. As she looked, the eastern sky commenced to lose its pallor; and then, softy and swiftly, the whole expanse of the horizon began to glow rosy red. As the light grew, the stretch of forest below began to manifest itself in a sea of billowy green. Wave after wave of forest seemed to fall back into the distance, till far away, beyond a great reach of dimness which seemed swathed in mist, the myriad peaks of the Rocky Mountains began to glow under the coming dawn. And then a great red ray shot upward, as though some veil in the sky had been rent, and the light of the eternal sun streamed through. Esse clasped her hands in ecstasy, and a great silence fell on her. This silence she realised as strange a moment after, for with the first ray of sunlight all the rest of Nature seemed to spring into waking life. Every bird - and the forest seemed to become at once alive with them - seemed to hail the dawn with the solemn earnestness of a Mahomedan at the voice of the muezzin, and the full chorus of Nature proclaimed that the day had come. Esse stood watching and watching, and drinking in consciously and unconsciously all the rare charm and inspiration of Nature, and a thousand things impressed themselves on her mind, which she afterwards realised to the full, though at the moment they were but unconsidered items of a vast mutually-dependent whole. Like many another young girl of restless imagination, at once stimulated and cramped by imperfect health, she had dipped into eccentric forms of religious thought. Swedenborgianism had at one time seemed to her to have an instinctive lesson which was conveyed in some more subde form than is allowed of by words. Again, that form of thought, or rather of feeling, which has been known as of the ‘Lake School,’ had made an impression on her, and she had so far accepted Pantheism as a creed that she could not dissociate from the impressions of Nature the idea of universal sentience. What the moral philosophers call ‘natural religion,’ and whose methods of education are of the emotions, had up to the present satisfied a soul which was as yet content to deal with abstractions. This content is the content of youth, for things concrete demand certain severities of thought and attitude which hardly harmonise with the easy-going receptivities of the young. At the present the whole universe was to Esse a wonderland, and its potentialities of expression and of deep meanings which she yearned for, and she could not realise - and did not in her ignorance think of the subject - proved to her that the Children of Adam, being finite in all their relations, can only find happiness in concrete reality. The religion of the men of Athens who set up their altars To The Unknown God’ was a type of the restless spirit of an unsatisfied longing, and not merely a satisfied worship of something beyond themselves. Not seldom in Greece of old did youth or maiden pass weary hours in abasement before a statue of Venus or Apollo, hoping for the incarnation of the god. So Esse in her unsatisfied young life watched and waited at the shrine of Nature, not knowing what she sought or hoped for, whilst all the time the deep, underlying, unconscious forces of her being were making for some tangible result which would complete her life.