Erema | Page 5

a blow that stunned all words, it smote my stupid,
wandering mind that all I had to speak and smile to, all I cared to please
and serve, the only one left to admire and love, lay here in my weak
arms quite dead. And in the anguish of my sobbing, little things came
home to me, a thousand little things that showed how quietly he had
prepared for this, and provided for me only. Cold despair and
self-reproach and strong rebellion dazed me, until I lay at my father's
side, and slept with his dead hand in mine. There in the desert of
desolation pious awe embraced me, and small phantasms of individual
fear could not come nigh me.
By-and-by long shadows of morning crept toward me dismally, and the
pallid light of the hills was stretched in weary streaks away from me.
How I arose, or what I did, or what I thought, is nothing now. Such
times are not for talking of. How many hearts of anguish lie forlorn,
with none to comfort them, with all the joy of life died out, and all the
fear of having yet to live, in front arising!
Young and weak, and wrong of sex for doing any valiance, long I lay
by my father's body, wringing out my wretchedness. Thirst and famine
now had flown into the opposite extreme; I seemed to loathe the
thought of water, and the smell of food would have made me sick. I
opened my father's knapsack, and a pang of new misery seized me.
There lay nearly all his rations, which he had made pretense to eat as he
gave me mine from time to time. He had starved himself; since he
failed of his mark, and learned our risk of famishing, all his own food
he had kept for me, as well as his store of water. And I had done
nothing but grumble and groan, even while consuming every thing.
Compared with me, the hovering vultures might be considered angels.
When I found all this, I was a great deal too worn out to cry or sob.

Simply to break down may be the purest mercy that can fall on truly
hopeless misery. Screams of ravenous maws and flaps of fetid wings
came close to me, and, fainting into the arms of death, I tried to save
my father's body by throwing my own over it.

CHAPTER III
A STURDY COLONIST
For the contrast betwixt that dreadful scene and the one on which my
dim eyes slowly opened, three days afterward, first I thank the Lord in
heaven, whose gracious care was over me, and after Him some very
simple members of humanity.
A bronze-colored woman, with soft, sad eyes, was looking at me
steadfastly. She had seen that, under tender care, I was just beginning to
revive, and being acquainted with many troubles, she had learned to
succor all of them. This I knew not then, but felt that kindness was
around me.
"Arauna, arauna, my shild," she said, in a strange but sweet and
soothing voice, "you are with the good man in the safe, good house. Let
old Suan give you the good food, my shild."
"Where is my father? Oh, show me my father?" I whispered faintly, as
she raised me in the bed and held a large spoon to my lips.
"You shall--you shall; it is too very much Inglese; me tell you when
have long Sunday time to think. My shild, take the good food from
poor old Suan."
She looked at me with such beseeching eyes that, even if food had been
loathsome to me, I could not have resisted her; whereas I was now in
the quick-reviving agony of starvation. The Indian woman fed me with
far greater care than I was worth, and hushed me, with some soothing
process, into another abyss of sleep.

More than a week passed by me thus, in the struggle between life and
death, before I was able to get clear knowledge of any body or any
thing. No one, in my wakeful hours, came into my little bedroom
except this careful Indian nurse, who hushed me off to sleep whenever I
wanted to ask questions. Suan Isco, as she was called, possessed a more
than mesmeric power of soothing a weary frame to rest; and this was
seconded, where I lay, by the soft, incessant cadence and abundant roar
of water. Thus every day I recovered strength and natural impatience.
"The master is coming to see you, shild," Suan said to me one day,
when I had sat up and done my hair, and longed to be down by the
water-fall; "if, if--too much Inglese--old Suan say no more can now."
"If I am ready and able and