Complete Works of Bram Stoker

by Bram Stoker

  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.

  Now, as she stood alone in the springing dawn, with the entire world seemingly at her feet, she began to feel that in the whole scheme of Nature was one deep underlying purpose in which each thing was merely a factor; that she herself was but a unit with her own place set, and the narrow circle of her life appointed for her, so that she might move to the destined end. It might be destiny, it might be fate, it might be simply the accomplishment of a natural purpose; but whatever it might be, she would yield herself to the Great Scheme, and let her feet lead her where instinct took them. And as she sighed in relief at not having to struggle any more - for so the emotion took her - she found herself repeating Coleridge’s lines:

  ‘And if that all of animated Nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast one intellectual breeze -

  At once the soul of each and God of all.’

  It was not, she felt, all fancy that the gentle sweet wind of the dawn took the pine-needles overhead, and rustled them in some sort of divine harmony with the poet’s song.

  Esse’s mood of semi-religious, semi-emotional exaltation was brought to an end by Dick, who came and stood beside her, and said, as he pointed with a wide, free sweep of his arm to the whole eastern panorama:

  ‘Considerable of a purty view, Little Missy!’

  ‘Oh, beautiful, beautiful! How you must love it who live here in the midst of it all. I suppose you were born on Shasta?’ Dick laughed:

  ‘Guess not much! I was raised somewhere out on the edge of the Great Desert. Mother couldn’t abide mountings, and kept dad down in the bottoms.’

  Then how did you ever come to Shasta?’

  Wall, dad he lived by huntin’ an’ trappin’ an’ when the Union Pacific came along, he found the place got too crowded; so he made tracks for Siskiyou! But, Lordy! it didn’t seem to be no time at all till the engineers began runnin’ new lines between Portland and Sacramento. So says dad: ‘If the Great American Desert ain’t good enough to let a man alone in, an’ if he gets crowded out of the chaparral at Siskiyou, then durn my skin but I’ll try the top of the mountings,’ so we up sticks and kem up here!’

  ‘And your mother?’ asked Esse, sympathetically; ‘how did she bear the change?’

  ‘Lor’ bless ye! she didn’t hev no change; why before we ever went to Siskiyou, she up an’ took a fever, an’ died. Me an’ dad scooped a hole for the old lady ‘way down by One Tree Creek. Dad said as how he didn’t see as she’d be able to lie quiet even there, with fellers bringin’ along school-houses, an’ dancin’ saloons, an’ waterworks, and sewin’ machines, an’ plantin’ them down right atop of her. Ye see, Little Missy, the old man were that fond of nobody that he didn’t take no stock whatever in fash’nable life - like you an’ me!’ A ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of Esse’s mouth; she was not herself in any way addicted to ‘society’ life, but rather longed for the wilderness - in an abstract form, and of course free from discomforts; but between Dick and herself there was so little in common - that was Dick’s very charm - that she wondered what might be the nature of that fashion which took them both within its limits to the exclusion of others. She was, however, interested in the man, and curious as to his surroundings, so she made an interrogative remark:

  ‘Of course you love living on the mountain; and never go into a town at all?’

  “Never go into a town! I should smile! Only whenever I can, and then, oh Lordy! but that town comes out all over red spots!’ Again Esse made another searching remark:

  ‘I suppose your wife goes with you!’ Dick laughed a loud, aggressive, resonant laugh, which seemed to dominate the whole place. The Indians, hearing it, turned to gaze at him, and as Esse looked past his strong face, jolly with masculine humour and exuberant vitality, at their saturnine faces, in which there was no place for, or possibility of a smile, and contrasted his picturesqueness, which was yet without offence to convention, with their unutterably fantastic, barbarous, childish, raggedness, she could not help thinking that the Indian want of humour was alone sufficient to put the race in a low place in the scale of human types. Dick continued to roar. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘my wife. Ha! ha! ha! Wall, that’s the best joke I heard since I see the Two Macs at Virginia City a twelvemonth ago.’ Then he became suddenly grave. ‘Askin’ yer pardon, Little Missy, fur laffin’ at yer words, but the joke is, I ain’t got no wife. No sir! not much!’ Here he turned away to avoid wounding her feelings, and his face was purple with suppressed laughter as he passed beyond the fire, where she heard his laughter burst out afresh amongst the Indians. Esse looked after him with a smile of amused tolerance. With a woman’s forbearance for the opposite sex - whether the object deserved it or not does not matter - she felt herself drawn to the man because of her forgiveness of him. The laughter, however, had completely dispersed the last fragments of her pantheistic imaginings, and she realised that the day was well begun; and so she went to the tent to her mother.

  When she opened the flap and entered, she felt a sense of something out of harmony. The white walls of the tent were translucent enough to let in sufficient light to show up everything with sufficient harshness to be unpleasant. Mrs Elstree and Miss Gimp still slept; the former lying on her side, with her golden hair in a picturesque tangle, and her bosom softly rising and falling; the latter on her back, with her mouth open, and snoring loudly. Her hair was tightly screwed up over her rather bald forehead, and in her appearance seemed to be concentrated all that was hard in Nature, heightened by the resources of art. Esse bent down and kissed her mother, and shook her gently, telling her that it was time to get up. Then she woke Miss Gimp, with equal gentleness, but with a different result. Mrs Elstree had waked with a smile, and seeing before her her daughter’s bright face, had drawn it down and kissed her. Miss Gimp woke with a snort, which reminded Esse of one time when her umbrella stick had snapped in a high wind, and, after scowling at Esse, turned over on her other side with a vicious dig at her pillow and an aggressive grunt. A moment later, however, the instinctive idea of duty, and work to be done, came to her, and instantly she was on her feet commencing her toilet; then Esse went out and sat by the fire, till presently her mother joined her, and later Miss Gimp, and they all fell to on the savoury breakfast which Le Maistre had ready for them.

  Whilst they were eating, the Indians had struck the tent; and very shortly the little cavalcade was on its way again under the spreading aisles of the great stone-pines, and tramping with a ghostly softness on the carpet of pine needles underfoot.

  The first part of the journey took them down into the valley overhung by their camping place of the night, but after crossing the stream which ran through it, they began a steady ascent which continued for hours. It was very much steeper than the ascent of the previous day, and the men all dismounted so as to relieve the ponies. Esse, too, insisted on w
alking, and by a sort of natural gravitation found herself at the head of the procession, walking alongside Dick, who held the rein of his pony over his arm. Hour after hour they tramped on slowly, only resting for a little while every now and again. At last, when the noon was at hand, they emerged from the forest on a bare shoulder of rock. At first the glare of the high sun dazzled Esse’s eyes, focussed to the semi-gloom of the woods; but Dick and the Indians felt no such difficulty, and the former, pointing up in the direction of the Cone, said:

  ‘Look, Little Missy. See where the tall pine rises above! There’s where you’re bound for, and the shaft of thet thar pine will tell you what o’clock it is.’ Esse clapped her hands with delight, for the home which she had so looked forward to was in their sight. It lay on a level plateau below where the belt of verdure stopped. It was still a considerable way off, and lay some seven or eight hundred feet above them, but a fair idea could be had of its location. It was just on the northern edge of the shoulder of the great mountain, and, so far as they could judge, must have a superb view. Esse was all impatience to get on, and her mother shared in her anxiety. She, too, wanted to see in what kind of place fortune had fixed her for the months to come. From this on, the trees did not grow so densely, and here and there were patches of cleared space, where the stumps of trees, some bearing the mark of axes, and some of fire, dotted the glade. The nature of the ground did not permit of their seeing the place of destination again till, after a long spell of upward ascent, followed by a stiff bit of climbing, they emerged on the northern edge of the plateau. Then Mrs Elstree and Esse agreed that they had never seen any place so ideally beautiful.