Now she stood as if deserted even by nature,
whose child she was; the rock was her resting-place, and the ocean
seemed the bed where she purposed to rest; she had no shells on her
bosom, no roses in her hair--her character seemed to have changed with
her feelings; she no longer loved all that is beautiful in nature; she
seemed, by an anticipation of her destiny, to make alliance with all
that is awful and ominous. She had begun to love the rocks and the
ocean, the thunder of the wave, and the sterility of the sand,--awful
objects, the incessant recurrence of whose very sound seems intended to
remind us of grief and of eternity. Their restless monotony of
repetition, corresponds with the beatings of a heart which asks its
destiny from the phenomena of nature, and feels the answer is--“Misery.”

“Those who love may seek the luxuries of the garden, and inhale added
intoxication from its perfumes, which seem the offerings of nature on
that altar which is already erected and burning in the heart of the
worshipper;--but let those who _have_ loved seek the shores of the
ocean, and they shall have their answer too. “There was a sad and troubled air about her, as she stood so lonely,
that seemed at once to express the conflict of her internal emotions,
and to reflect the gloom and agitation of the physical objects around
her; for nature was preparing for one of those awful convulsions--one of
those abortive throes of desolation, that seems to announce a more
perfect wrath to come; and while it blasts the vegetation, and burns up
the soil of some visited portion, seems to proclaim in the murmur of its
receding thunders, that it will return in that day, when the universe
shall pass away as a scroll, and the elements melt with fervent heat,
and return to fulfil the dreadful promise, which its partial and
initiatory devastation has left incomplete. Is there a peal of thunder
that does not mutter a menace, “For _me_, the dissolution of the world
is reserved, I depart, but I shall return?” Is there a flash of
lightning that does not say, _visibly_, if not audibly, “Sinner, I
cannot now penetrate the recesses of your soul; but how will you
encounter my glare, when the hand of the judge is armed with me, and my
penetrating glance displays you to the view of assembled worlds?”

“The evening was very dark; heavy clouds, rolling on like the forces of
an hostile army, obscured the horizon from east to west. There was a
bright but ghastly blue in the heaven above, like that in the eye of the
dying, where the last forces of life are collected, while its powers are
rapidly forsaking the frame, and feeling their extinguishment must
shortly be. There was not a breath of air to heave the ocean,--the trees
drooped without a whisper to woo their branches or their buds,--the
birds had retired, with that instinct which teaches them to avoid the
fearful encounter of the elements, and nestled with cowering wings and
drooping heads among their favourite trees. There was not a human sound
in the isle; the very rivulet seemed to tremble at its own tinklings,
and its small waves flowed as if a subterranean hand arrested and
impeded their motion. Nature, in these grand and terrific operations,
seems in some degree to assimilate herself to a parent, whose most
fearful denunciations are preceded by an awful silence, or rather to a
judge, whose final sentence is _felt_ with less horror than the pause
that intervenes before it is pronounced. “Immalee gazed on the awful scene by which she was surrounded, without
any emotion derived from physical causes. To her, light and darkness had
hitherto been the same; she loved the sun for its lustre, and the
lightning for its transitory brilliancy, and the ocean for its sonorous
music, and the tempest for the agitation which it gave to the trees,
under whose bending and welcoming shadow she danced, in time kept by the
murmur of their leaves, that hung low, as if to crown their votarist. And she loved the night, when all was still, but what she was accustomed
to call the music of a thousand streams, that made the stars rise from
their beds, to sparkle and nod to that wild melody. “Such she had been. Now, her eye was intently fixed on the declining
light, and the approaching darkness,--that preternatural gloom, that
seems to say to the brightest and most beautiful of the works of God,
“Give place to me, thou shalt shine no more.”

“The darkness increased, and the clouds collected like an army that had
mustered its utmost force, and stood in obdured and collected strength
against the struggling light of heaven. A broad, red, and dusky line of
gloomy light, gathered round the horizon, like an usurper watching the
throne of an abdicated sovereign, and expanding its portentous circle,
sent forth alternately flashes of lightning, pale and red;--the murmur
of the sea increased, and the arcades of the banyan-tree, that had
struck its patriarchal root not five hundred paces from where Immalee
stood, resounded the deep and almost unearthly murmur of the approaching
storm through all its colonnades; the primeval trunk rocked and groaned,
and the everlasting fibres seemed to withdraw their grasp from the
earth, and quiver in air at the sound. Nature, with every voice she
could inspire from earth, or air, or water, announced danger to her
children. “That was the moment the stranger chose to approach Immalee; of danger
he was insensible, of fear he was unconscious; his miserable destiny had
exempted him from both, but what had it left him? No hope--but that of
plunging others into his own condemnation. No fear--but that his victim
might escape him. Yet with all his diabolical heartlessness, he _did_
feel some relentings of his human nature, as he beheld the young Indian;
her cheek was pale, but her eye was fixed, and her figure, turned from
him, (as if she preferred to encounter the tremendous rage of the
storm), seemed to him to say, “Let me fall into the hands of God, and
not into those of man.”

“This attitude, so unintentionally assumed by Immalee, and so little
expressive of her real feelings, restored all the malignant energies of
the stranger’s feelings; the former evil purposes of his heart, and the
habitual character of his dark and fiendish pursuit, rushed back on him. Amid this contrasted scene of the convulsive rage of nature, and the
passive helplessness of her unsheltered loveliness, he felt a glow of
excitement, like that which pervaded him, when the fearful powers of his
“charmed life” enabled him to penetrate the cells of a madhouse, or the
dungeons of an Inquisition. “He saw this pure being surrounded by the terrors of nature, and felt a
wild and terrible conviction, that though the lightning might blast her
in a moment, yet there was a bolt more burning and more fatal, which was
wielded by his own hand, and which, if he could aim it aright, must
transfix her very soul.