I felt Bessy's heart beat against mine, but I was her brother. In two minutes she was asleep, utterly exhausted; and I kept watch while the last ray of moonlight faded from the sky. Very soon after, the first faint beams of morning began to spread up towards the zenith.
It was a beautiful night and a beautiful morning, calm and sweet and peaceful; contrasting strangely and painfully with the dreadful scenes which had been enacted within the last few hours.
In our flight from the house, and the long walk we had taken with real dangers on every side, and all those which imagination never fails to supply in moments of agitation and peril, I had had no time for thought.
But now, as I rested here, with Bessy in my arms, and the tranquil change going on above from night to morning, the mind seemed hurried on with wild rapidity, as if by a runaway horse. Thought thrust upon thought; memories, expectations, fears, hopes, doubts, questions, all trod upon each other's heels; and before one had time to obtain full possession of the ground, it was gone, displaced by another.
What a multitude of incidents had occurred since, a few months before, I had laughingly taken my departure from Norfolk, feeling life and the world to be great jests, and hardly believing in the reality of anything! What a multitude of incidents! I speak not of mere material facts, but of mind and heart facts. What new friends, what new enemies had arisen! What perils, what pains, what hopes, what happiness, what new objects, purposes, desires, had crowded upon me! What new thoughts had entered the brain, what new feelings had been born in the heart! It seemed almost a life-retrospect--like one of those pageants of past existence, which, I am told, sweep before the eyes of a drowning man in the last expiring blaze of consciousness.
For some time, this great and strange impression--for it was more a general impression than a sequence of ideas--kept possession of my mind; but then I forced my thoughts away, and fixed them upon the more important facts of the present. What had become of Mr. Stringer and his family? Were they all dead, all slaughtered? What had become of poor Zed, who had so heroically risked his own life to secure to me and Bessy a few moments more for escape? Was it to be expected that, in the rage and excitement of the moment, the furious savages, drunk with blood and murder, would spare any one who opposed them, of whatever colour he might be?