Wacousta : a tale of the Pontiac conspiracy (Complete)Richardson, Major (John)
General
Wacousta : a tale of the Pontiac conspiracy (Complete)
Richardson, Major (John)
Pontiac's Conspiracy, 1763-1765 -- Fiction
We should vainly attempt to paint all the heart-rending misery of the
scene exhibited in the gradual restoration of Miss de Haldimar to her
senses. From a state of torpor, produced by the freezing of every
faculty into almost idiocy, she was suddenly awakened to all the
terrors of the past and the deep intonations of her rich voice were
heard only in expressions of agony, that entered into the most
iron-hearted of the assembled seamen; while they drew from the bosom of
her gentle and sympathising cousin fresh bursts of desolating grief.
Imagination itself would find difficulty in supplying the harrowing
effect upon all, when, with upraised hands, and on her bended knees,
her large eyes turned wildly up to heaven, she invoked in deep and
startling accents the terrible retribution of a just God on the inhuman
murderers of her father, with whose life-blood her garments were
profusely saturated; and then, with hysteric laughter, demanded why she
alone had been singled out to survive the bloody tragedy. Love and
affection, hitherto the first principles of her existence, then found
no entrance into her mind. Stricken, broken-hearted, stultified to all
feeling save that of her immediate wretchedness, she thought only of
the horrible scenes through which she had passed; and even he, whom at
another moment she could have clasped in an agony of fond tenderness to
her beating bosom,--he to whom she had pledged her virgin faith, and
was bound by the dearest of human ties,--he whom she had so often
longed to behold once more, and had thought of, the preceding day, with
all the tenderness of her impassioned and devoted soul,--even he did
not, in the first hours of her terrible consciousness, so much as
command a single passing regard. All the affections were for a period
blighted in her bosom. She seemed as one devoted, without the power of
resistance, to a grief which calcined and preyed upon all other
feelings of the mind. One stunning and annihilating reflection seemed
to engross every principle of her being; nor was it for hours after she
had been restored to life and recollection that a deluge of burning
tears, giving relief to her heart and a new direction to her feelings,
enabled her at length to separate the past from, and in some degree
devote herself to, the present. Then, indeed, for the first time did
she perceive and take pleasure in the presence of her lover; and
clasping her beloved and weeping Clara to her heart, thank her God, in
all the fervour of true piety, that she at least had been spared to
shed a ray of comfort on her distracted spirit. But we will not pain
the reader by dwelling on a scene that drew tears even from the rugged
and flint-nerved boatswain himself; for, although we should linger on
it with minute anatomical detail, no powers of language we possess
could convey the transcript as it should be. Pass we on, therefore, to
the more immediate incidents of our narrative.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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