TAKEN CAPTIVE.
Samuel Parris bore his daughter home and laid her on her own white bed,
where she writhed like a wounded fawn in the snow. Her face was rosy
with flushes, that came and went like gleams of light on marble; her
lips were in constant motion; she muttered continually about Barbara
Stafford and Norman Lovel. Sometimes she called aloud for her mother,
and declared with child-like earnestness that she saw her gliding
through the room with her golden hair smoothed under a close cap, and a
white dress sweeping around her like the wings of an angel.
The old minister listened to all this in stern sorrow. His ewe lamb was
smitten down before his eyes: God had suffered his idolatrous love to
find a terrible punishment. What could he do? how act to save that
beautiful one from perdition?
Norman Lovel was sad. Barbara Stafford had disappeared like a myth. His
approach seemed to have driven her away, and he found Elizabeth, from
whom he had parted in anger, writhing on a bed of pain, muttering her
wild fancies and crying aloud for help.
Abigail Williams moved about coldly and in breathless silence. The curse
of witchcraft was upon the house, hatred and death clung around it like
cerecloths to a coffin. What if she, too, were possessed--the story of
old Tituba, a device of the Evil One, and the young chief so wildly
beautiful, who claimed relationship with her, the arch fiend himself?
The very foundations of her reason seemed shaken by these doubts, and as
the moans and cries of Elizabeth reached her ear from time to time, she
would pause in her work and stand motionless like a block of marble,
till some new sound startled her into life again.
All night Samuel Parris sat by the bedside of his child, pallid and
thoughtful. Over and again he questioned her in the midst of her wild
speeches, as a judge sifts the words of a doubtful witness. Sometimes he
fell into audible prayer, and again sat in dull silence pondering
gloomily.
When the morning came he went forth, and, mounting his horse, rode to
the nearest magistrate, who was a deacon in his own church, and a man of
iron domination. Samuel Parris knew well that after his appeal to this
man, there could be little free will left to him.
No wonder then that he walked heavily, and paused long upon the
door-step before entering. He shrunk from hunting down the life of a
helpless woman, and shuddered at the thought of making a charge from
which there was no chance of retreat.
The minister went in at last, and the door closed heavily after him. The
sound of a muffled drum could not have followed his footsteps more
solemnly.
After an hour the old man came forth again, and moved with a slow tread
down the village street toward his own dwelling. As he passed the doors
of his parishioners, men and women came out and questioned him in low
tones, and with looks of awe, regarding the condition of his child. He
answered them all patiently, but with a sad weariness of manner that
turned curiosity into compassion.
On the threshold of his home Samuel Parris met three men, members of his
own congregation, who greeted him in silence, as neighbors salute the
chief mourners at a funeral. Then the four passed in, and mounted to the
chamber where Elizabeth lay, with her wild eyes lifted to the ceiling,
and her hands waving about in the air.
These four good men--for after the manner of the times they were
good--sat down in silence, and each gathered from the lips of the
delirious girl the evidence which was to imperil a human life. When they
had listened an hour keenly and conscientiously, each according to his
light, they arose and went forth, shaking Samuel Parris by the hand with
touching solemnity.
The old minister saw his friends file away from the house, and bend
their course toward that of the magistrate, and then he felt with a pang
of unutterable sorrow that the fate of Barbara Stafford had passed out
of his hands.
That day a posse of men, headed by a constable, armed with a warrant to
arrest Barbara Stafford for witchcraft, passed through the village and
into the forest, taking the track which the unhappy woman had pursued.
The moss and forest sward was moist yet, and with the keen eyes of men
accustomed to pursue an Indian trail they found traces of her
progress--now a faint footprint--then a broken twig or a fragment of her
garments. Thus step by step they pursued her, till at last the whole
group stood upon a swell of land that overlooked the hollow in which the
Indians had built that sylvan lodge. At the entrance a red shawl had
been stretched, which was now folded back to let the daylight through,
and in the warm shadow beyond they saw the object of their search
sitting in dreary thought.
A single Indian lay upon the turf a little way off, guarding the lodge
with a vigilance the more watchful because his companions had gone forth
in search of food.
The posse of men held a whispered consultation. They understood the
condition of things, and resolved to act promptly before help came.
In the savage warfare which had ended in the subjugation of the kingly
tribes, Indian life was held scarcely more sacred than that of the wild
deer and panthers that infested the hills. When the constable saw that
athletic savage lying upon the turf, with his broad chest exposed like
that of a bronze statue, he drew the gun which he carried to his
shoulder with a grim smile, called on God to bless the murder, and
touched the ponderous lock with his finger. A sharp click, a loud
report, a fierce cry: the savage leaped into the air, fell upon his
face, all his limbs quivering, and with a single spasm lay dead across
the entrance of Barbara Stafford's hiding-place.
Barbara came forth white and trembling, saw the dead savage at her feet,
and looked fearfully around for his murderers. A group of men and a
wreath of pale smoke curling out upon the air revealed all her danger.
She did not retreat, but fell upon her knees and lifted the head of the
Indian up from the ground. Drops of crimson stole down the bronze chest
and fell slowly to the turf.
Barbara did not attempt to escape, though she saw at a glance all her
danger. The savage who had been her protector was shot through the
heart. The sight of so much life and strength smitten down in one
instant paralyzed her. She had never witnessed a violent death before,
and the shock bereft her alike of hope and fear.
The constable understood, and whispering his men to follow, crept toward
her. She saw him without caring to escape, but, stooping over the body
of her friend, shook her head mournfully as he came up.
"Unhappy man, you have killed him," she said, lifting her eyes to his
face with a glance of pathetic reproach.
The constable stooped down, dragged the body from her feet, and cast it
headlong down the slope of earth on which she stood. Then, without a
word, he seized Barbara by both her wrists, and grasped them together
with a firm grip of one hand, while he searched in his pocket for a
thong of deer-skin prepared for the occasion. Putting one end of the
thong between his teeth, he wound the other tightly over her wrists--so
tightly that the delicate hands grew purple to the finger ends. Then he
finished his barbarous work with a double knot tightened with both hands
and teeth.
The outraged woman lifted her eyes to his face with a frightened look as
he performed this brutal act, but she neither protested nor struggled;
once she observed gently that he hurt her hands, but, when no heed was
taken, allowed him to proceed without further remonstrance.
When her hands were bound, the constable tore down her shawl from the
entrance of the lodge and placed it on her shoulders, crossing it over
her bosom and knotting it behind, thus forming a double thraldom for her
arms.
She bore it all patiently and in silence; once she cast an earnest look
into the depths of the forest, perhaps with a hope that her savage
friends might come to the rescue, but she only met the gleaming eyes of
a wild-cat, swinging lazily on a bough to which human approach had
driven him. Even there her glance was answered by a low growl and a
gleam of savage teeth. The wild beasts were defying her in one
direction, and human cruelty dragging her to death in another.
Thus, helpless and unresisting, she was forced into the settlement
again, bound like a criminal. She made neither protest nor resistance,
but remained quietly in the hands of her captors, accepting her fate
with touching resignation.