The skins of gorgeous
birds were round her waist; her hair was wreathed with fragrant tropic
flowers. On her bosom lay a baby--it was my cousin's. I knew her, and
hated her. The madness came upon me. I longed to leap from the bough and
tear her limb from limb; but brutal terror, the dread of man which is the
doom of beasts, kept me rooted to my place. Then my cousin came--a hunter
missionary; and I heard him talk to her with pride of the new world of
civilization and Christianity which he was organizing in that tropic
wilderness. I listened with a dim jealous understanding--not of the words,
but of the facts. I saw them instinctively, as in a dream. She pointed up
to me in terror and disgust, as I sat gnashing and gibbering overhead. He
threw up the muzzle of his rifle carelessly, and fired--I fell dead, but
conscious still. I knew that my carcase was carried to the settlement; and
I watched while a smirking, chuckling surgeon dissected me, bone by bone,
and nerve by nerve. And as he was fingering at my heart, and discoursing
sneeringly about Van Helmont's dreams of the Archaeus, and the animal
spirit which dwells within the solar plexus, Eleanor glided by again, like
an angel, and drew my soul out of the knot of nerves, with one velvet
finger-tip.
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