Silent Struggles Part 47

She neither spoke nor moved, but her form shrunk together, and her garments began to tremble, as if she were suffering from cold. He spoke to her, but she did not answer. He stooped down to address her, and the shivering fit came on again. His stern heart was filled with compa.s.sion, and yet she had not spoken a word. A gush of strange, tender pity swelled his breast, and he turned away, with dew in his eyes--such dew as had not sparkled there in twenty years.

He went back and bent over her; the velvet of his cloak swept her lap, his breath almost stirred her hair.

She gave him one wild look, and dropped her head again, while, with her two hands, she grasped a fold of his cloak, and pressed it to her lips.

The hands fell to her knees, the cloak swayed back to its natural folds, and he was all unconscious of the movement. In his earnestness, and compelled by a power that endowed him with momentary eloquence, he was pleading with her to give her true name and history, in order that he and those who wished her well might find some means of defence when she should be brought to trial.

She heard him, like one in a dream--a sweet, wild dream--for her lips parted with a heavenly smile, and she held her breath, as if it had been a delicious perfume, which she would not permit to escape from the bosom it thrilled. A shiver still ran through her frame. It was no longer as an expression of pain, but like the exquisite tremor which the south wind gives to a thicket of roses.

She could not have spoken, had the whole world depended on her voice; so his pleading was all in vain. Had she uttered a sound, it would have been a cry of wild thanksgiving. Had she moved, it would have been to throw herself at his feet. She did move, and half rose from the wooden bench on which she was seated, but, seeing young Lovel at the door, fell back again, shrouding her face in the shawl, and murmuring prayers of entreaty and grat.i.tude that she had escaped a great peril. The shawl m.u.f.fled her voice, but the governor saw that she was praying, and retreated toward the door.

"Tell her to think of what I have said--to send me any information--I will not ask it to be a confession--on which she may found a defence before the judges," he said, addressing young Lovel; "she is frightened by my presence and has no power to speak; persuade her to confide in you, Norman. Surely, as the Lord liveth, this woman has some great power, for good or for evil. Those who visited Peter in his prison must have felt as I do now."

"Hear how she sobs!" said the young man, deeply moved. "Oh! your excellency, go back; her heart is softened; she may speak to you now; I never heard her weep so pa.s.sionately before."

"No," said the governor, gently, "I will not force myself upon her grief. Give her time for thought, and opportunities for prayer. The devil had power over the Holy One forty days and forty nights. It may be that this poor lady is going through a like probation. She may come forth with the radiance of an angel at last."

"She is an angel," answered Lovel, with tender enthusiasm. "Oh! if she could but be brought to confide in you."

"We can at least delay the trial, and give her time," said the governor.

"Perhaps this scourge of the evil one may pa.s.s away without crushing her, if she is protected till the power has reached its climax."

The governor went away, after saying this, a thoughtful and saddened man. His intellect was clear, and his strength of character too powerful for that profound faith in witchcraft which influenced many of the clergy and judges of the land. He was not a person to join men, who should have stood between the superst.i.tion of ignorance and its victims, but rather gave this superst.i.tious frenzy the force of their superior intelligence, and such dignity as sprang from position. The commotion which this subject had created in his government--the solemn trials held upon helpless old men and women, followed by bloodshed and terror--had already filled his mind with misgiving. Though, for a season, he was borne forward by the public clamor, and had in his own experience no strong proof against the phenomena produced in confirmation of witchcraft, he had never entered heartily into the persecutions of the courts. Nor had he risen up against them, because in his own soul there was doubt and misgiving.

Barbara Stafford had not spoken a word in his presence, yet her silence and the very atmosphere of truth that surrounded her had affected him deeply. After this interview he began to doubt more than ever if the great excitement of the day might not merge into persecution; if the pure and the good might not possibly suffer with those given over to the prince of darkness.

CHAPTER XLII.

OLD FRIENDS IN COUNCIL.

When Sir William returned home, he found Samuel Parris, his old patron and early preceptor, waiting for him. The good man had taken his staff and walked all the way from Salem, to seek counsel and consolation of his powerful friend.

Between these two men was a tie which no one could fathom--a tie stronger than that which might have bound master and pupil, or benefactor and protege. Phipps had sprung from a poor apprentice boy, to be the richest and most powerful man in New England. He had won t.i.tle and wealth from the mother government, by his indomitable energies, while Samuel Parris had dreamed his life away, under the roof where the embryo great man had taken his first charity lesson. But though one was a man of thought, and the other of progress, no distance of time nor station could separate them.

Governor Phipps was in the prime of life, a man of n.o.ble presence, strong in intellect and in power. Parris was old and bowed to the earth with trouble; the white locks floated thinly over his temples, his black eyes were sharp and wild with protracted anguish. But the two met kindly, as they had done years before. The strong man forgot his successful ambition, and the state to which it had led. With the feeble old minister he was an apprentice boy again.

Sir William found the minister sitting in his library, exhausted with fatigue and completely broken down by the awful affliction that had fallen upon him. Dust from the road lay thick upon his heavy shoes and along the seams of his black garments, while it turned his snow white hair to a dull gray. His stout cane was planted hard on the carpet, and his weary head fell on the withered hands clenched tremulously over it.

Thus tired, desolate, and broken-hearted, the old man waited for his former pupil.

"My dear, old master--my best friend!" cried Phipps, smitten with a thousand memories, both of pain and pleasure at the sight of his preceptor. "I can guess what has brought you hither. The same subject is weighing on my own heart. I have just returned from a conference with that unhappy lady."

Samuel Parris looked up eagerly.

"You saw her? She spoke with you? Tell me, tell me, did the woman confess?"

"Nay, she did not speak."

"What, obstinately silent? does the evil spirit take that course?" said Parris.

"Not obstinately silent: I did not say that; on the contrary, she seemed deeply moved, and her sobs filled the room as I left it."

"But she confessed nothing?"

"Nothing!"

"Nor has she told any one a word of her own history?"

"Not a word."

The old man lifted his wild eyes to those of his friend, and searched the expression there as if his life depended on it.

"William Phipps, you think this woman innocent?"

"I feel that she is innocent, but magistrates do not judge by feeling.

Justice appeals only to the brain, while mercy is a child of the heart.

Samuel Parris, as I came from Barbara Stafford's prison, it was with a thankful spirit that G.o.d had not made me one of her judges."

"But I--I am her accuser!" cried out the old man, in pa.s.sionate sorrow.

"But you had good grounds. This charge came not from you or yours, lightly or with malice: of that I am certain," said the governor, soothingly.

"But it came from me in terror and sore perplexity. The sight of my child possessed with the evil one urged me on. William, William, I thought of her, rather than of G.o.d's service! It is this that troubles me."

"But how of the maiden? Is she better or does this fiend rend her yet?"

"She is better. Since the sound sleep into which the woman cast her, Elizabeth has been quiet; but thoughtful as I never saw her before. The flush has left her face and half the time her eyes are full of tears, but she says little."

"These are favorable symptoms," answered Sir William. "Does the maiden still persist in thinking this woman the cause of her malady?"

"Both its cause and its cure. To her she has been an angel of wrath and of mercy both. But another cause of sorrow has sprung up in my household--Abigail Williams!"

"What, the dark-eyed girl that Lady Phipps thought so beautiful? Has this wicked contagion seized on her also?"

"Worse than my child. She seems smitten to the soul with sullen sorrow and deadly hate. Above all she dreaded old t.i.tuba, who followed her from room to room like a dog at first, but when the girl drove her away, she sat down on the kitchen hearth with her feet in the ashes, refusing to eat or sleep, but kept up a weird chant that filled the house night and day with deathly music."

"Does this old woman accuse any one?"

"Nay, she simply accused herself. Once or twice she has gone out to the forest and stayed all day. At last she persuaded Abigail to go into the woods with her. After that, the strange animosity which had seized upon the maiden died out, and she was much with old t.i.tuba who went quietly about her household work again."

Sir William listened to all this with grave attention. He was striving to judge how far the disturbed state of the minister's household had arisen from natural causes, but in his profound ignorance of all those sources of irritation which had preceded Barbara Stafford's arrest, he was unable to give them any solution save that of witchcraft, strongly as his sound judgment rebelled against it.

"Tell me, and speak I adjure you in the fear of G.o.d--tell me, William Phipps, if after hearing the evidence on which I have accused this woman, you can find one reason for thinking the charge of witchcraft without just foundation."

The governor, who sat with his elbow resting on the library table, bent his forehead thoughtfully on one hand.