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.