"It puts me in mind of my young days," remarked Silas, "when I used to
steal out of bed to go bobbing for hornpouts and eels.
Heigh-ho!--well, life and death together make sad work for us all!
Then I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old
fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads;
if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel
kind o' sorrowful."
"I wish, at least, you would hold your tongue," muttered I.
The moon, that night, though past the full, was still large and oval,
and having risen between eight and nine o'clock, now shone aslantwise
over the river, throwing the high, opposite bank, with its woods, into
deep shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually. Not a
ray appeared to fall on the river itself. It lapsed imperceptibly
away, a broad, black, inscrutable depth, keeping its own secrets from
the eye of man, as impenetrably as mid-ocean could.
"Well, Miles Coverdale," said Foster, "you are the helmsman. How do
you mean to manage this business?"
"I shall let the boat drift, broadside foremost, past that stump," I
replied. "I know the bottom, having sounded it in fishing. The shore,
on this side, after the first step or two, goes off very abruptly; and
there is a pool, just by the stump, twelve or fifteen feet deep. The
current could not have force enough to sweep any sunken object, even if
partially buoyant, out of that hollow."
"Come, then," said Silas; "but I doubt whether I can touch bottom with
this hay-rake, if it's as deep as you say. Mr. Hollingsworth, I think
you'll be the lucky man to-night, such luck as it is."
We floated past the stump. Silas Foster plied his rake manfully,
poking it as far as he could into the water, and immersing the whole
length of his arm besides. Hollingsworth at first sat motionless, with
the hooked pole elevated in the air. But, by and by, with a nervous
and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into the blackness that
upbore us, setting his teeth, and making precisely such thrusts,
methought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy. I bent over the
side of the boat. So obscure, however, so awfully mysterious, was that
dark stream, that--and the thought made me shiver like a leaf--I might
as well have tried to look into the enigma of the eternal world, to
discover what had become of Zenobia's soul, as into the river's depths,
to find her body. And there, perhaps, she lay, with her face upward,
while the shadow of the boat, and my own pale face peering downward,
passed slowly betwixt her and the sky!