IN CAPTIVITY
Although the villain knew not that the chief--whose name I learnt
hereafter was Anuza, signifying in the Shawnee and Doeg tongue, the
Bear--had heard all, his rage was terrible. He gesticulated so before
Mary that again I feared for her, he struck at Buck, calling him thief
and other opprobrious names, and he kicked at O'Rourke's body as
though he would kick in his ribs. Then, swearing and vowing that if
Mary spoke before his followers--for so he called them--as she had
spoken now he would, instead of taking her for one of his squaws, have
her tongue cut out of her mouth so that she should never speak again,
he called for the Indians to enter from without. And they, coming in a
moment or so afterwards, showed no signs upon their impassive faces of
having overheard, or understood, one word that had been uttered.
The dawn had come now, and the light as it crept in to my ruined
saloon served but to increase my sense of the horrors of the night. At
the side of the window to which they had been pushed by Anuza and the
others, so as to allow for easy ingress and exit, lay huddled together
numberless dead Indians, two or three of my poor servants, and the
bodies of the mastiffs, all of which had been slain after a fierce
resistance. The carpets and rugs for which my father had sent to
London were torn and slit and drenched with blood, the spinet and the
harpsichord were both ruined, ornaments were broken, and the pictures
splashed with blood. Oh, what a scene of horror for the sun to rise
upon!
"Let all the prisoners who are alive be taken to the woods at once,"
exclaimed Roderick to Anuza; "to-night we start back to the mountains.
Our work is done. Pomfret is destroyed, or destroyed so much that
years shall not see it again as it was."
Once more, as at his coming, Anuza and his followers prostrated
themselves low before him, whereby I feared that, after all Mary's
denunciations, they still might not have understood how vile a
creature was this whom they worshipped--and then, addressing us, the
impostor said:
"My loves that shall be--my sweet ones of the Wigwam, I leave you now
while I go to seek others to accompany you to our homes. For your
friends shall be with you, I promise you. You shall, I hope, see
cousin Gregory from whom I was once threatened a beating, and Roger
Cliborne, who was to have been married a week hence. Ha! ha! And
Bertram Pringle; he, too, shall ride with us and we will see if his
courage is as great as that of his vaunted fighting cocks. All, all,
my fair Joice and you, my Mary, shall you see, and"--coming close to
us, while he hissed out the words with incredible fury--"you shall see
them all die a hideous, lingering death by tortures such as even no
saint in the calendar ever devised for his enemies. Farewell until
tonight." After which, calling to his guards, he strode forth into the
morning air accompanied by them.
For a moment Anuza the Bear stood where the window once had been while
gazing after him, his huge form filling up half the vacant space as he
did so. Then slowly, and with that stately grace which the Indian
never lacks, he returned to where we were--I being again crouched on
the floor with my beloved one's head in my arms--and standing before
Mary, he said:
"White woman, were the words that fell from your lips to him the words
of truth? Is he all that you have said?"
"He is all that I have said," she answered, "ay, and a thousand times
worse. Why do you ask?"
Yet she told me afterwards that she already guessed the reason of his
question.
He made no reply but still stood gazing down at her from his great
height, while she returned his glance fearlessly; then he turned to
one of his warriors behind him and spoke to him in their own tongue,
whereon the man vanished and came back a moment afterwards bearing in
his hand one of my great bowls full of water.
"Drink," he said to her, "and refresh yourself." When she had done so
he passed the bowl to me, bidding me drink also. Likewise he let me
bathe my darling's lips with the cool water and lave his temples, and
he permitted Mr. Kinchella to drink; while, on Buck and Lamb making
signs that they too were thirsty, water was fetched for them by
another savage.
Next, he sat himself down upon a couch that stood against the wall
opposite to us and, with his chin in his hand, sat meditating long,
while we could form no guess as to what shape those meditations were
taking. Then once more, when our suspense was intense, he spake again,
addressing me this time:
"White maiden, you who rule as mistress of this abode, you and she
spoke to him as one whom you had known before. Answer me, and answer
truly, what know you of him? And has this, your sister," for so he
seemed to deem Mary, "also spoken truly?"
"Alas! alas!" I replied, "only too truly. He came to my father's house
a slave bought with his money," here the Bear started and clenched his
great hands; "yet was he not made a slave because of our pity for him.
He ate my father's bread and, in return, he sought the dishonour of
his daughter." Then, being sadly wrought upon by all the misery that
had come upon us, I threw myself upon my knees before him as I had
done to that other, and, lifting up my hands in supplication, I cried
again, "Oh chief of the Shawnee warriors, if in your heart there is
any of that noble spirit with which your race is credited, pity me and
mine; pity us, pity us! Your fathers, as I have said, ate once of our
bread, this house which you have to-night made desolate sheltered them
once. Will you show us no more gratitude than that craven whom you, in
your delusion, worship as a great medicine chief?"
He bade me rise, even assisting me to do so, and motioned to one of
the braves to wheel up another couch on which to seat myself, and all
the time he muttered to himself, "A slave! a slave! a drunkard! a
cheat!" and his eyes glistened fiercely.
But at last he rose to his feet again, and said with the calm that
distinguished all his actions:
"The time has come to set forth to the mountains---"
"No, no!" Mary and I shrieked together, "No! no! Spare us, oh! spare
us. Nay, rather slay us here on the spot than let us fall into his
hands."
"If," he replied, looking down imperturbably upon us, "you have spoken
truth, as from his own manner I deem it to be, no woman will ever fall
into his hands again. If he has deceived us as you have said, no
punishment he promised for the prisoners of Pomfret will equal that
which he himself will endure. I have spoken."
"And our dear ones," I said, "what, what shall become of them? Oh! do
not tear us from those we love," while, even as I spoke, I flung
myself on Gerald's body and kissed his lips and wept over him. "Those
who are alive must journey with us into the forests and towards the
mountains--those who are gone to their fathers we war not with. This
one," he said, stooping over Gerald, "this one, who was you say to
have been your mate, is not dead, but--he will die."
Again I shrieked at his words, though as I did so I saw so strange a
look in the chief's eye that the shriek died upon my lips. It was a
look I could not understand.
"He will die," he went on, "he will die. Yet he was a brave man; of
all white men in this house none last night fought more fiercely. And
this other," turning to the body of O'Rourke, "he too still lives, and
he too will die. Let him lie here."
His glance rested next on Mr. Kinchella, and, in the same soft
impassive voice--the voice in which there was no variance of tone--he
said, "You are unharmed?"
"Yes," the other replied, "I am unharmed."
"And you," exclaimed the Bear, striding to where all the others stood
bound, "you, too, have escaped our weapons; the great War God has
spared you?"
"Ay, noble chief," exclaimed Buck, as though addressing a comrade,
"the great War God, as you call him, generally does spare Peter Buck.
I was born to good luck, and, noble chief, being so spared I'm going
to give you a few revelations about your great medicine man who's just
gone out."
"Silence," exclaimed Anuza, "not now; not now. But come, the day has
arrived. We must go forth." Then turning to me he said, "Take your
last farewell of him you love."
Oh! how I kissed my darling again and again, how I whispered in his
ears my love for him in those sad moments of parting, while Mary knelt
by my side and comforted me and Mr. Kinchella stood by gazing down on
to Gerald's white face. To think that I should have to leave him lying
thus, to think that this was our parting when our love was but so
newly told!
They took us away very gently, it is true, from my old house, now so
wrecked and battered; they let me go back once more to press my lips
to his; they even let Mary and me go to our rooms, escorted by a
guard, to fetch our cloaks and hoods. But, gentle as these savages
were now--far, far more so, indeed, than could ever have been
believed, remembering all the stories of their cruelty that we had
listened to--their firmness and determination never varied and we were
as much prisoners as though we had been shut up in a fortress.
Yet, at that last parting to which I was allowed to run back ere we
left the room, there happened a thing that brought some joy to my poor
bruised heart. For, as once more I stooped over Gerald to take, or
rather give, my last kiss, I heard O'Rourke whisper low--his body
lying close to my lord's: "Fear not to leave him. I was but stunned,
and I doubt if he is much worse. And believe in me. He shall be my
care. As soon as may be, we will follow you. Fear not."
And so I went forth with them, and there was greater peace at my heart
than I had dared to hope would ever come again.
All that day we rode towards the forests that lie at the foot of the
mountains and, there having been enough horses in my stables, as well
as that of O'Rourke, none of us were without one. Ahead of all went
Anuza--the Indians themselves being all mounted on horses they had
obtained from the village--speaking no word to any one, but shrouded
in his impenetrable Indian calm; behind him followed a score or so of
his warriors, then we, the prisoners, came, and then the remainder of
the band. Speech was not forbidden us--indeed, there was no enemy for
our captors to fear if Pomfret was destroyed and all the dwellers
thereabouts either driven forth or massacred--and so we conversed in
whispers with each other and discussed in melancholy the sad fate that
had befallen us all.
"Yet," said Mr. Kinchella who rode by Mary and me, "I cannot fear the
worst. The chief's behaviour is not that of the Indian who is taking
his victims to a dreadful death. The denunciation of that scoundrel by
Mary has caused a terrible revolution in his mind; he seems, indeed,
more like one who is carrying witnesses against another than one who
is leading forth prisoners."
"And, reverend sir," said Buck, who rode close by, "what's more is
that the chief doesn't stomach the business he is about. He knew well
enough that neither his lordship nor the captain was badly wounded,
and he left 'em there to escape as best they might--any way he gave
them a chance."
"Yet he said that he did so," I replied with a sob, "because they
must die."
"Ay, mistress," answered Buck, "so they must. All men must die. But
they're not a-going to die yet, and he knew it. But I'll tell you who
is going to die, and that before long. That's Roderick, the medicine
man. He's marked as much as any man ever was when the dead warrant
came down to Newgate. Ay! and a good deal more, too, for mine came
down once and yet here I am alive and well, while the old judge who
tried and sentenced me has gone long ago, I make no doubt."
"What will they do to him?" Mary asked.
"Do? Do, mistress? Why convict him of being an impostor, and
then--why, then they'll tear him all to pieces. That's what they'll do
with him. And when they've finished with him there won't be as much
left of Roderick as will make a meal for a crow. I've spoken with men
who have been captured by the Indians and lived to escape from them,
and awful tales I've heard of their tortures, but the worst tortures
they ever devised were kept for those whom the Indians have trusted
and been deceived by. And you had only got to look at this chief's
face when you, missy, were denouncing him, to guess what's going to
happen to the other."
As he spoke we did, indeed, remember the look on Anuza's face as he
stood behind the window frame. Also, I remembered the strange glance
he gave me when he said that Gerald and O'Rourke should live though
they must die later. So that it verily seemed as if Buck had rightly
interpreted all that was going on in our captor's mind.
We halted that night on the skirts of a forest with, to the west of
it, a spur of the Alleghany Mountains. The scene itself was
picturesque and beautiful, while, to our minds, it had something of
the awful and sublime in connection with it. For here it was that,
although not more than forty English miles from where I had dwelt all
my life, the limit to what we knew of the mysterious unknown land
lying to the west of us ceased. Into those mountains, indeed, the
rough backwoodsman had penetrated sometimes, bringing back stories of
the bands of savages who dwelt within them; we knew that living with
these bands were white men and women who, as children, had been torn
from their homes and parents in raids and forays, but we knew little
more. And for what lay beyond the mountains still farther to the west
we knew nothing except that, thousands of miles away, there was
another ocean which washed the western shores of the great land in
which we dwelt, and that on the coast of that ocean were Spanish
settlements, even as on our coasts there were English settlements.
But, of all that lay between the two when once the mountains were
passed, no man knew anything.
And now it was that into those mountains we were to be taken, those
mountains to which Roderick St. Amande had fled from my father's
house, and where, to the Indian dwellers within them, he had appeared
as a great magician or sorcerer.
The halt for the night was made, as I have said, on the skirts of the
forest, with cool grass beneath the trees and, above us, those great
trees stretching out their branches so that they were all interlaced
together and formed a canopy which would have kept the rain from us
had it been the wet instead of the exceeding dry season, and with,
sheltering in those branches, innumerable birds twittering and calling
to each other. It was, indeed, a strange scene! Around us in a vast
circle sat the Indians, speaking never at all to each other, but
smoking silently from the pipes they passed from one to the other,
their faces still with the war-paint upon them and their bodies, now
that the night was coming, wrapped in their blankets. Inside that
circle we, the prisoners, were huddled together, Mary being at this
time asleep with her head on her lover's shoulder and I lying with
mine upon her lap, while the men, now no longer my servants, or, at
least, my slaves, talked in whispers to each other.
And near us, in the glade, there stood that which we in our poor
hearts regarded as an omen of better things to come. An object which,
at least, went far to cheer us up and to inspire us with the earnest
hope that, even between us and those in whose hands we were, there
might still be a possibility of peace and of mercy from the victor to
the vanquished. This thing was a rude stone in the form of a monolith,
made smooth on one side and with, upon that smoothness, these words
carved: "It was to this spot, in ye yere 1678, that Henry Johnson was
brought from the mountains by an Indian woman, he being a boy of ten,
and set free to return to Jamestown because, as she said to him, 'she
pitied his poor mother.' 'I cried unto Thee in my trouble and Thou
heard'st my prayer.'"[4]
Seeing this stone before us growing whiter in the dusk as the night
came on, we, too, in our hearts cried unto the Lord and besought Him
to hear our prayers and to give us freedom from our enemies and all
dangers that encompassed us about.