Silent Struggles Part 32

Scarcely had the two cousins left the woods, when, upon the very path they had trod, appeared Barbara Stafford, the woman who had inquired for the minister at his house that morning. Immediately after breakfast she had wandered into the open air, and, after lingering around the meeting-house a while, went into the forest. The hum of insects, and the rustle of leaves, fell soothingly upon her, and with a dreamy listlessness she moved on, sitting down at times when she came to some flower or shrub which seemed strange or curious; but frequently leaving it half examined, and moving on again restlessly searching for something else.

At last she came out on the ledge, which the cousins had just left, and sighing softly as she crossed the carpet of gray moss, sat down upon the rock sofa and fell into thought. The place seemed to have some peculiar fascination for her, for she grew paler and paler in that dim religious light, giving way to feelings that could only rise unchecked in the profoundest solitude. At last, her agitation became so great, that she fell forward upon the cushions and began to moan faintly, as those who have lost the power to weep express pain, when it becomes insupportable.

As she remained thus, the young hunter, who had twice appeared before the cousins, came out upon the lower shelf of the rock, and, without seeing her, threw himself on the edge, and lay still, as if waiting for some one.

The sound of Barbara Stafford's voice arrested his attention. He arose, clambered softly to the higher shelf of rock, and stood a moment, leaning on his gun, regarding her with vague thrills of agitation.

Though he could not see her face, the mysterious atmosphere that surrounds a familiar person made its impression upon him, and he recognized her at once.

At last, oppressed by a human presence, which, even unseen and unheard, will make itself felt to a delicately organized person, Barbara lifted her head. She did not speak, but her lips parted, her eyes grew large, and a flash of wild astonishment rushed over her face.

"In the name of Heaven what is this?" she cried at last, reaching forth her hand, as if she doubted that the presence was real.

A convulsion of feeling swept over the young man's face; the gun dropped from his hold, and, forced to his knees, as it were against his will, he seized her hand, and pressed it to his lips wildly, madly, then cast it away, with a gesture of rage at himself, for a weakness of which his manhood was ashamed.

Barbara Stafford had no power to repulse this frantic homage. She had but just begun to realize that he was alive and before her--that it was his hot lips that touched her, and his flashing eyes that poured their fire into hers. The hand he had dropped fell listlessly by her side. She sat up, regarding him haughtily.

"Philip!"

The voice was stern with rebuke. The whiteness of anger settled on her features.

"Yes," said the young man. "It is Philip, the slave to whom you opened the avenues of knowledge, and whose soul you tempted from its strength by the dainty refinements of civilization. It is the Bermuda serf, whom you made free and enslaved again. But still the son of a king, and the chief of a brave people. Woman, you dashed the shackles from these limbs only to gird them around my soul; and then left me to writhe myself to death, a double serf, and a double slave!"

"Philip, you are mad--nay, worse--you are ungrateful. Am I to suffer forever for those impulses of compa.s.sion that took you from under the lash of a slave-driver, and helped you to the key of all greatness--knowledge? Am I blamable if that too fiery nature would not be content with grat.i.tude, but, having gained liberty, and all the privileges of free manhood, asked that which his benefactress could not give--which it was presumption to seek?"

"I was the son of a king," said the hunter, proudly, "the only son of a brave man, and a woman beautiful as yourself, a woman who had blood in her veins as white and pure as that which my presence has just frightened from your own cheek. Look around: from the ocean to the mountains every thing was my father's till the people of your race came, like a pestilence, across the sea, and, more by cunning and hypocrisy than power, wrested his dominion away, and drove his people to death or slavery. Lady, there was no presumption in the thought, when the wronged heir of Philip of Mount Hope offered the love of a free, brave man, who had learned both how to think, and how to act, to the daughter of--"

"Hush! I charge you, hush!" cried Barbara, starting to her feet, "not even here must you p.r.o.nounce that name--I thought myself utterly unknown. If I have ever been good to you--if it was a kindness when I won you from slavery, by tears and entreaties, that would not be refused--if the friendship of years, sacrifices, efforts, and that pure affection which a childless mother may bestow on the young man whom she would gladly have regarded as a son, gives me any claim on your forbearance, let my secrecy be respected! I am weary, wretched, broken-hearted enough already: do not add to the misery of my condition by a reckless word, or an unguarded look!"

Barbara clasped her hands, and was about to sink to her knees in pure agitation as she made this appeal.

The young hunter prevented the action by a prompt movement, and fell at her feet with an impulse of generous humility.

"Lady, command me! Do not entreat! What have I done that you should rebuke me by a request?"

Barbara smiled, and touched his forehead lightly with her hand.

Instantly, a soft mist dulled the fire of those splendid eyes, and the young man bowed his head, thrilled to the heart by the proud magnetism of her look.

"Tell me, Philip," she said, very gently, "tell me how it is that I find you here, in a place so full of danger. Why come again to the lands that have pa.s.sed from the possession of your people forever--lands that are swept away, and held securely in the grasp of civilization? What can you hope--what can you expect, by this mad return?"

"What can I hope, lady? That the soil upon which I stand will still be mine. What do I expect? That my father's people may be gathered together from the swamps of the lowlands, and the caves of the mountains, and, united in the midst of their old hunting-grounds, meet their enemies face to face, and fight them as my father did--conquer them, as he would have done, but for the traitors in his bosom; or failing, perish like him!"

"My poor, brave Philip!" said Barbara, regarding the youth with unutterable compa.s.sion, "what men could do your father and his chiefs essayed, and in vain. It is not fighting man to man here. There is no fair combat of human strength or manly intellect; but you combat with destiny--that grand, cruel thing, which comes in the form of civilization. Ah, Philip, there is no contending against that."

"Then let me die with the people who call me king; but die avenging the wrongs that have driven our chiefs into slavery, and left our tribes nothing but basket-makers and hunters of musk rats!" cried the youth, desperately.

"Lady, do not counsel or thwart me here; the blood of two races, fiery and hot with a sense of wrong, urges me on. My brain aches with thought, my heart beats loudly in its hope for vengeance on the men who slew my father, and sought to starve my soul down to contented servitude.

Neither heart nor brain will be argued or persuaded into submission.

Beyond this, and inspiring it all, I wait for the sad scornfulness of that smile to disappear. When his people are once more a nation, you cannot say that the son of Philip of Mount Hope was presumptuous in loving you."

"And is this wild feeling at the bottom of it all?" said Barbara, in a voice full of regret.

"It has brought me across the ocean, lurking like a hound in the hold of the same vessel with yourself--it has filled me with ambition to rebuild the fortunes of a down-trodden people. When these brave men they call savages are linked in one common band and common cause--like the chieftains of Scotland, each a sovereign lord in himself--we shall meet these wily white men, and conquer back the forests they have wrested from us. Hitherto their brain-craft has more than overmatched our strong arms; but I have learned something of their coward wisdom in the lands to which you have sent me. If I studied law and military science in England, it was that I might learn the art by which men rule their fellow-men. I have used the means you gave me to learn that power of mind which sways mult.i.tudes more surely than the stout arm or certain eye. Lady, I have, in my search for the great secret by which your people stole away the Indian birthright, learned to despise our conquerors. But not you! not you! My grat.i.tude lifted you out from among them all. It was because my soul thanked you so tenderly that it lost itself in love."

"Ah, Philip," said the lady, "but for this madness how great you might become!"

"Say not so. All the thirst for greatness that I have springs out of the mighty love that you will not listen to," answered the young man.

"Because it is madness--insanity. I say nothing of the barriers which rank and civilization build up like a wall between us two; but nature herself should chill such feelings in their birth. Why, young man, I had learned to hope and suffer, as woman can alone hope and suffer, before you were born."

"Be it so--I care not. Souls made for eternity are neither brightened nor dulled by a few years of time. I see only what is grand and beautiful in the only woman of her race that this heart ever deemed worthy of a warrior's love."

The young man towered proudly upward as he spoke. The gorgeous robe which he had a.s.sumed with his savage state, shook and rattled as he gathered it over his chest. The lady gazed upon him with irresistible admiration. She might rebuke his love, and shrink with womanly delicacy from any fulfilment of his hopes, which, in truth, seemed to outrage the august dignity of her years. But there was a grandeur in the young man that forced her to respect him--a truthfulness which enlisted all her sympathies.

"Philip," she said, extending her hand, which he kissed reverently, as if she had been an empress, and that moss couch her throne, "I will not bid you G.o.d-speed in the grand, but I think hopeless, task you have undertaken, much as I deem you wronged; because my judgment, calmer than yours, tells me how surely civilization must sweep the darkness of barbarism before it. The virgin soil of this new world is required for the growth of food for the surplus population which is now sweeping across the Atlantic in a slow but steady tide from the old world. That which civilization demands it will attain. Hope not to match the bravery of your warriors against the keen energy of the Anglo-Saxon. Where he treads, opposition, nay, justice itself, sways backward. Cool, resolute, sometimes unscrupulous, he never recedes, but swiftly as time advances so does he. Look along the coast already has he hewn down the mighty forest, and let the sunshine in to ripen the grain planted within sight of your very wigwams. Already are cities and towns sending up their spires to heaven. Every courthouse, and every place of worship thus marked in the landscape, is a barrier stronger than any military fortress, against the idea of Indian sovereignty that now heaves that chest, and kindles those eyes."

The young man's lip curved, and his eyes shone as he answered:

"Lady, forgive me; but you speak like a woman, whose destiny is to think, not to act. But in my heart the barbarism out of which true heroes spring, and the Anglo-Saxon blood of which you boast, meet and swell together into one mighty resolve. We will first conquer our foes; then wrest from them the secrets that make the soil teem with food and beauty for their use. While the earth rolls, and the sun shines, brave men of all nations will seek the war-path; the church spires and halls of justice will never prevent that. But, like the white man, we will plant corn where the earth has been made richest with human blood, and let wild flowers start into bloom above the graves we have filled to loathing with dead foes."

"But if you are ready to follow the lead of our people so far," said Barbara, "why not join them in amity now?"

"Because the Indian would be master of the soil he plants, and the game he shoots. King Philip of Mount Hope acknowledged no peer. They slew him, but he filled a monarch's grave. Has the blood of a white woman, martyred for her faith, made his son so weak that he needs Anglo-Saxon adventurers and dissatisfied clergymen to share authority with him?"

Barbara arose, and reached forth her hand.

"Farewell!" she said, with sweet mournfulness. "That I meet you here and thus, is a new pang and a new sorrow. I had hoped to find you content and happy, on my return to Europe; but alas, these awful forests seem to swallow up every thing upon which my poor heart leaned. G.o.d help me, for now I feel more alone than ever. Ah, Philip, if you would only be persuaded to recross the Atlantic--there alone you are safe."

"Lady, when I am indeed a chief, and my brave warriors have turned the churches you boast of into wigwams, I will cross the sea, and ask again if great deeds and undying love may claim at least a patient hearing."

Barbara shook her head.

"Not with that hope--not with such intent," she answered, gravely; "for it can never be. Now, farewell."

"Adieu, but not forever," answered the young man, bending low over the hand she offered. "These are unsafe times, and with all your pride there will come a season when you will have need of me. The spirit which hunted Anna Hutchinson into the forest, and drove my mother out to starve, is not yet appeased. New victims will be wanted. The great Anglo-Saxon mind that you speak of is, after all, but slavish and half developed--the outgrowth of that very tyranny of opinion it fled to avoid. Those who brave martyrdom ever are foremost in persecution. Lady, beware of these new people. Nay, I had better say, take no heed; for I who, hating slavery, glory in being your slave, will guard you well."

With these words the youth s.n.a.t.c.hed up his rifle, pointed out a footpath, which Barbara turned into, and both disappeared in opposite directions.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

WORKING OF THE EVIL SPELL.

Elizabeth Parris was in her own little chamber, in the gable end of her father's log house; the window looked out toward the sea, and a beautiful glow of sunshine lay upon the pasture land which stretched between it and the sh.o.r.e, turning the water to sparkling sapphires, and the green of the land to a richer emerald tint, as the day drew toward its noon.

There was something very pretty and picturesque about Elizabeth's room.

Though a tiny little place compared to that she had just left in the gubernatorial mansion, it possessed a score of dainty trifles, that, at first sight, awoke in her heart a sweet home-feeling, which went rippling like a trill of music through her whole being. So she went from object to object, arranging one, displacing another, and fluttering to and fro like a bird that returns to its cage, after a long, pleasant flight in the open air.