CHAPTER XI.
“DESERTED ARE THE DWELLINGS OF MOINA.”
It has been shown how easily Hope Vines had been seized, even in the presence of her friends; for the two conspiracies against her—that of the Pilgrims to seize her person and arraign her for witchcraft, when death, in its most appalling shape, would undoubtedly have awaited her, and that of the Indians, who wished to exalt her as a wild-wood sibyl—produced so many and conflicting movements, that attention was divided, and the unhappy girl fell an easy victim to the snares of her captors.
Once securely in their hands, she was conveyed to one of their great magicians, who, by spells and enchantments, with which the tribes, from time immemorial, had been familiar, soon consigned her to a long, deep sleep.
Placed upon skins of the finest and purest texture, spread upon a wicker-frame which swung lightly between poles carried by sure-footed runners, Hope was borne away into the pathless wood, with no chance for rescue.
The Indians came and went among the colonists, but so well did they preserve their native immobility of feature, and reticence of tongue, that no suspicion was attached to them. With one exception, the old group of visitors was unchanged. Samoset, the crafty and experienced chief, eluded all questions, and even joined in the search; but his daughter, Acashee, no more frequented her old haunts; she dared not encounter the fiery glances of John Bonyton, who, she well knew, would couple the disappearance of Hope with her own hatred and revenge.
Slowly, fearfully passed the days; there were no tidings of Hope Vines. Days grew into months, and these into years, and yet she came not, and the beautiful, white-haired child, whose looks had been forever associated with the fate of Walter Raleigh, in the minds not only of his kinsmen, but of the colonists at large, grew to be a tale of the olden time.
Threads of her long, soft, silvery hair were looked upon as sacred relics. The fearful charge of witchcraft, which the elders would have preferred against her, awakened only recollections of reprehension, and people recalled nothing but her rare loveliness and her bright, poetic fancies, which rendered her
“A thing of beauty, and a joy forever.”
There were those who remembered those wonderful eyes of hers, so deep, so bright, and yet so foreboding, oftener fixed upon the skies than upon the earth, and these believed her white locks might be seen mingling with the mist of the Pool, and that her sweet body mingled with its perpetual ebb and flow.
Others, remembering her weird, supernatural beauty, and the attempts made by the Terrentines to obtain possession of her person, believed she still lived among them, secreted in some solitary cave, or mountain gorge, where her oracles inspired their chiefs to great deeds, and helped the women to courage and magnanimity. Little Hope was fast fading into the dim obscurity of fable and romance.
The family of Sir Richard Vines, never popular, as we have shown, with their austere neighbors, gradually withdrew themselves from all intercourse with them. Mistress Vines conceived the idea that the Bonytons and others had practiced upon poor Hope some of those terrible ordeals designed to ascertain her complicity with witchcraft, and, the ordeal having proved fatal to the victim, her death, and the tortures by which it had been accomplished, were doomed to be held a profound secret.
This idea she never relinquished, nor was she over careful in expressing her surmises, and the consequence was, a double share of animosity was visited upon the unhappy household. Acts of secret malignity were not unfrequent, and the situation of the family grew yearly more uncomfortable, till at length Sir Richard determined to leave a people by whom he was so little appreciated, and so little understood.
He found himself losing that hardihood and elasticity, which had once made peril and adventure like a bugle-call to his vigorous and buoyant spirit. He found himself wandering with John Bonyton about mountain and forest and dell, yearning with indescribable sorrow over the loss of one whose life had been so free from all that could elicit displeasure; whose simple affections and poetic fancies resembled some beautiful sprite, conjured by the poet’s dream, rather than a being of everyday life.
But it was upon John Bonyton that the blow most fearfully told, and upon him were most permanently affixed the ineffaceable marks of a life-long sorrow.
Mistress Bonyton had, from a miscalculation of her own maternal proclivities, as we have before intimated, prepared herself remorselessly to weave a fatal net around Hope Vines, caring less for the influence of Hope upon her son than did the rest of her family—her principal motive being to humble the pride of Mistress Vines, and punish her for some little neglect or discourtesy from which she conceived herself aggrieved.
But when Hope really disappeared—when no clue could really be found to her whereabouts, and when she saw her favorite son cut down and broken-hearted at the uncertainty of her fate, her womanly nature struggled through the crust of years and a warped intellect, and she was overwhelmed with remorse and regret.
Seeing the young man seated alone upon “Bass Rock,” where he and Hope had so often pursued their sport, and where she had once watched the two with fascinated interest, she laid aside her knitting, and, casting a shawl over her shoulders, went forth to talk with him, and console him, if she could.
The youth saw her approach, and waved her back; but she pressed forward, saying:
“Oh! my son, let me speak to you—comfort you, if I can.”
He looked her coldly, sternly in the eye.
“Mother, are you free from all blame in this? Know you nothing of her fate?”
“Nothing—as there is a God in heaven, I know nothing.”
“Oh, mother! mother! there is still blood upon your skirts. I have heard your talk. It may be she has escaped a worse death by her present fate!”
“What mean you, my son?”
She was pale and trembling; she knew well the meaning of his words.
“You know what I mean. A curse upon a people who forget the ties of blood, and the claims of humanity, to gratify an idle spleen, and call it religion!”
“These are strong words to me, John.”
“What have you said? what vile calumnies have you set afloat, mother? You would have taken that innocent child—that pure, harmless baby—that little incarnated spirit of helpless girlhood—and have given her over to the brutes in human shape, to torture, and drown, and burn, and hang, as they are now doing in Europe. This you would have done.”
The woman crouched down on the rock before her own child, condemned, humiliated. He had revealed her to herself, and she trembled before him.
“Go, mother, go! I have not slept beneath your roof since I learned this. I never shall again. Better the bare rock and the cold mountain dew than to dwell with hypocrites and murderers.”
“John, do not curse me; do not leave my gray hairs to sorrow, to death.”
“I curse you not. Oh, mother, there is no love, no kindness in the hearts of these people.”
“Only conform to them, John—only be one of them, and you will find every heart open to receive you.”
“Never—never, mother! I know what they had designed to inflict upon Hope Vines. Had she lived—had she been here, and a hand been laid upon her, the blood that would have followed would be upon your head, not mine.”
He lifted himself up and strode away, leaving the conscience-stricken woman to weep and wring her hands alone. Her daughter came and bore her home, but Mistress Bonyton was no more the proud, scheming woman she once had been. If Mistress Vines wept for her daughter, Mistress Bonyton was made to shed more bitter tears at the alienation of her son.
Sometimes the latter, in his long days and weeks’ search for the lost girl, abandoned the settlement altogether, and lived in the wigwams of the simple savages, who did all in their power to comfort and console him. The Saco tribe was no less ignorant than the colonists of the fate of Hope, but they saw how grief had stricken him down, and in their true hearts they felt a human compassion which might well have been emulated by those of his own kind, but was not.
The young man was convinced in his more serene moments that Hope had fallen a victim to the snares of Acashee, or the Spider. He recalled her words, “You had a friend; you have a foe,” and he felt the secret of her fate was known fully to the Terrentines. Moody and taciturn, he wandered along the sea-shore, traversed the pathless woods, and watched the setting stars from solitary mountain hights. Sometimes he would appear in the Vines mansion, where he would for hours stealthily scan the faces of its inmates, and then depart with a groan.
“Gone, gone, and not a face is left to look like little Hope!”
At length the great Hall of Sir Richard Vines was closed forever, and the owner abandoned a colony which had become endeared to him by so many labors and sorrows, and which to him still bore the phantom presence of little Hope. He removed his household gods to the island of Barbadoes, with which he had hitherto associated himself in commercial transactions.
Here we must bid adieu to the courtly household, which is no longer associated with the history of our country, but which, in their new home, became comparatively happy and most prosperous.
Mistress Vines grew at length calm under her bereavement, and learned to say, in the meek spirit of religious love and divine faith, “Thy will be done.”
More than two hundred years have passed away since the princely dwelling was left to decay, but some traces of the old residence of a courtly household may still be found.
We hear the location sometimes called “Old Orchard,” because here are found fruit-trees heavy with the moss of age, and vines struggling for life amid the indigenous plants, fair exotics lost and overwhelmed by time.