The priests of the Androscoggins appeared one by one within this vast
temple or grotto which we have described, followed by the ancient
chiefs of the tribe, each bearing a symbol indicative of his rank or
office. It was observed that the Grand High Priest entered and threw
himself before the stone of sacrifice in silence. His robe was gathered
closely to his person, but what was most ominous of all, he had covered
his face with the wings of the bat, which totally concealed his
features.
All eyes followed his movements, and all ranged themselves in a circle
beneath the overhanging arch; low moans escaped from his breast; he
writhed upon the ground, and spread forth his hand as if for succor. At
length these words burst from his lips, in a low wail like one who is
compelled to speak, when he would choose to be silent:
“Where are the leaves of the late summer tree?
Gone--down-trampled forever, and lost.
Where is the mist that rose from the sea?
Turned into stone by the lips of the frost.
“Where are the braves that march to the fight?
Hark! ’tis the shrieking of maidens I hear!
The warriors are gone--they vanish from sight.
Where is the battle-cry sweet to the ear?”
At these words, each priest and chief bent the head, and covered his
face with his robe.
“The augury may be averted. Arise, thou cowardly priest, and prepare
the sacrifice,” cried Acashee.
They sprung to their feet and gazed upon the bold speaker, and she a
woman. They accepted the omen, and gathered about the altar.
Acashee had bound a white tunic over her shoulders; she had crowned
her head with the leaves of the sacred mistletoe, sacred to the Indian
as well as to the Druid, because it is a parasite, and lives on the
blood of another, scorning the coarse, damp ground. She stood with
outstretched arms, and pointed to Hope Vines.
“Take her and appease the spirit, and save our braves!”
But Acashee had not foreseen the awe with which the pale child inspired
those children of the woods. Eager to crush her rival--eager to
immolate her upon the altar of her revenge, she had hoped to see them
rush forward and hurl her upon the stone of sacrifice, bleeding and
quivering in death, and thus her triumph had been complete.
Hope stood calm and silent, her small hands crossed and spread upon her
breast, her eyes raised upward, an image of saintly grace and purity.
Some thought of ecstacy, some wild dream of beauty, some vision of
supernal realms, may have descended upon the soul of the lonely child,
separated from kindred, and for years, as we have intimated, consigned
to this solitary grotto. Her person robed in skins of the softest and
whitest texture, her hair grown so as to nearly reach her feet, her
skin of the purest white, with dark eyebrows and long black eyelashes,
gave a depth and splendor to her eyes, dazzling to behold; and thus she
stood in the midst of a race foreign and uncomprehending, except that
a divine instinct impressed them with awe. The light of the burning
torches illuminated the far-off arches, changing the pellucid pendents
of the roof to topaz, sapphire and ruby; showing vista beyond vista of
snowy arch and crystal dome, resplendent in a thousand prismatic hues,
and she in the midst, like some embodiment of supernatural beauty; a
dazzling creature, compounded of those elemental forces which preside
over rock and fall, such as the genius of Greece has left as the
creations of the classical mind.
The Indians beheld her with awe, and knelt before her. Even the
vindictive Acashee stood silent, spell-bound by a spirit which had
mastered her own.
At length slowly raising her hand upward, she spoke in a clear voice,
and yet with a something in its tone as if it came a long distance.
“I behold a band of warriors--brave as the bravest. I hear the cry of
derision--the vaunt of the warrior. Slowly the mist is ascending--I see
the hand of a woman, and before it fly the brave men, a thousand pale
specters trooping to the spirit-land!”
With a deep sigh she turned her eyes downward, placed her hand upon the
head of a pet panther, which crouched at her feet, and slowly moved
away under the gorgeous canopy of overhanging pearl and amethyst, and
disappeared in the distance.
The Indians listened aghast, and watched her receding figure till it
disappeared. They coupled her prediction with the ambiguous words of
the priest, and they became filled with doubt and dismay.
In the long years of her imprisonment, ignorant of the place of her
seclusion, conscious only that its distance must be great from all
that she had known or loved, for she had traveled days and even weeks
before her captors reached the falls, she had despaired of ever again
beholding a white human face. She had been taken while sleeping under
the bed of the river, and placed as we find her, like some ancient
priestess, alone in this vast temple, to await divine oracles.
To the eye of the Indian she had been passive; she had awed him by her
calm self-reliance; she had held him in subjection by a power allied to
prophecy, which came upon her, how and when she knew not. She spoke,
and they listened with profound awe; she commanded and they obeyed.
Once, a chief had told her of the departure of her father and all
the household from the colony, but the name of John Bonyton had not
sounded upon her ears in all this weary time, till it was pronounced
by Acashee. At that sound, years were annihilated, the torpor of time
vanished, and Hope Vines trembled with the newly-awakened emotions of
her early days.
With that audacious activity which marked the action of her childhood,
Hope had practiced one feat totally unknown to her captors. She had
watched the advent of visitors to the cave, and found they always
appeared at one particular side of the water, and that without much
apparent effort. Following up this suggestion, she had dared the
attempt, and found it achieved with little difficulty. Often, when her
captors were buried in sleep, Hope darted below the jutting waters, and
landed upon a smooth rock at the river-brink.
She was a child of bright and varied fancies, and to her mind, the
wild magnificence that met her eye was a full reward for the danger
she incurred. The gorgeous beauty of the grotto, also, afforded her
exhaustless emotions of delight, and believing herself forever debarred
from all companionship with her own people, she yielded to the romance
which surrounded her with something more than content.
She recalled the story of her kinsman, Sir Walter Raleigh, with
whose melancholy history she felt herself allied, and believed this
imprisonment of hers was a part of that mysterious link which always
had woven her destiny with his, and she unconsciously resigned herself
to the position for which she had been destined by her captors. By them
she had been abducted, because they believed in her supernatural gifts,
and Acashee had lent herself to the plan that she might sever her
forever from the companionship of John Bonyton.
Acashee had been compelled to avoid the Pool ever after the abduction
of Hope. She could resign the man whom she had learned to love with a
wild infatuation, conscious that he had never returned her love, but
she could not resign him to a rival. Blighted in her own hope, revenge
took the place of the gentler emotion, and the Indian woman felt a
strange delight in contemplating in her own mind the misery she had
occasioned in another.
A party of her tribe having been surprised by the Sacos, and herself
taken prisoner, Acashee had again beheld John Bonyton, and felt a
revival in her breast of that fatal love which had for years been the
bane of her existence; but when he had recognized her, when he had
cut away those locks, as precious to the Indian maiden as the snood
to the Highland virgin, or the scalp-lock to the warrior, her hatred
knew no bounds, and she resolved, with the consent of the chiefs, to
hide herself in the sacred cave of the Pejipscot till her hair should
grow again, and where she might feast her eyes upon the misery of Hope
Vines; but silence and solitude are great prompters, and she, who had
come to revile and torture, found herself awed in the presence of one
whose claims to superior and supernatural wisdom she had heretofore met
with derisive skepticism.