Silent Struggles Part 27

"But you shall work no more. I will save you from drudgery at least."

"No, no. Let t.i.tuba alone. She is used to it. Work--work--work. What would t.i.tuba be without work? Let her plod on in the old way, Mahaska.

The tree thrives best in its own soil. Dig honeysuckles and wild strawberries from the wood--plant them in your garden, and they grow.

But when an old hemlock begins to die like this, let it stand--stir not the earth about its roots."

The old woman touched her gray hair as she spoke, and drooped into her old position. Abby sat looking at her in tender astonishment. She could understand the great love which had brought that n.o.ble savage from the wilderness to be a drudge in her uncle's kitchen; it exalted the old, withered creature at her feet into a heroine.

"And for our sakes you gave up your people, your free life, all that makes the happiness of a forest child; and came here to be a slave!"

"t.i.tuba only followed her child!" was the simple answer.

"But Elizabeth Parris knew nothing of all this! To her you are only--"

Abby broke off, for she felt that the truths she was about to speak were cruel.

"I am only old t.i.tuba to her, but she is all the world to me."

"And yet you hate her father--her stern, kind-hearted father, for that the minister is."

"He was your mother's judge before he became her father!"

"And she is the grandchild of Anna Hutchinson, equally with myself!"

said Abigail, musing.

"But not the child of King Philip. Not the sister of the last chief of the Wampanoags, who now wanders like a wild beast through the lands his people once owned. She, my golden-haired child, is not the one who must avenge her grandmother's wrongs. From the beginning, she and her mother were like singing birds to be fed and cared for. You and your mother were eagles, with strength to swoop on their enemies and your own.

Elizabeth must never know the events that are making your face so dark."

"But why, why is the suns.h.i.+ne all for her, the darkness for me?"

answered Abigail, with sorrowful bitterness.

The old woman began to weave her hands together, and rock to and fro with a troubled look.

"The eagle soars; the mocking-bird sings. One seeks her nest in the leaves, the other sits on the crags."

"The bleak, bare crags for me--flowery hollows for her," said Abigail, despondingly. "It was so with our mothers; it must be so with us."

As she spoke, the outer door of the house opened, and Wahpee, an old Indian, who, like t.i.tuba, had been for years a hanger-on of the minister's kitchen, entered the sitting-room. He had been absent some days, and it was in expectation of his return that the young girl and t.i.tuba were sitting up so late.

The Indian seemed tired with travel. His dress of homespun linen was torn in places, and the rents pinned up with thorns just plucked from their trees. The lank hair was moist, and a rain of perspiration glistened on his tawny forehead. Abby rose from her seat, and went eagerly toward him.

"Wahpee--Wahpee, have you seen him?--where is he now? Have any number of his people joined him yet?"

Wahpee shook his head.

"Ask Wahpee nothing; he has no words. Give him bread and dried-beef. The Wampanoags planted no corn, and they have no muskets to shoot down the deer that look in their eyes without moving as they file one by one through the woods. Even the young fawns grow bold, now that the warriors have given up their guns."

"And is he near and hungry?" cried Abby, hastening to the kitchen, where old t.i.tuba was dragging forth bread from a huge oven, in which it had been left after the week's baking; and crowding loaf after loaf into a flour sack, she helped to lift it on Wahpee's back.

Both Abigail Williams and t.i.tuba would have followed the old Indian into the forest; but he curtly ordered them back, and went on himself, carrying the bag of bread. They stole after him at a distance, notwithstanding his interdict, till they came to the meeting-house. Here they paused. The shadows upon the brink of the woods were black as death; and as the old man entered them he was lost in an instant.

"Let us wait," said t.i.tuba, "they will come out together. Metacomet will come to his mother's grave; and then we shall know what he is doing."

Abigail went silently after the old woman, and sat down on a flat stone, half buried in moss and ferns, at the foot of a huge pine tree, which sheltered two graves. There she seemed covered by a vast pall, the shadows fell so heavily upon her.

t.i.tuba dropped down at Abby's feet, and gathering her limbs together, began a low chant, that mingled in the s.h.i.+ver of the pine leaves with inexpressible mournfulness.

Abby leaned her head against the trunk of the pine and listened. Strange to say, that chant, instead of depressing, kindled her spirit. She never came to that spot, and heard the mysterious whispering of the leaves, without a wish for action, an unaccountable desire to plunge into the wilderness and remain there forever. Only one week before, she had wandered to the same spot, and there, for the first time, learned from his own lips that she had a brother; that the blood of King Philip mingled with that of Anna Hutchinson, the martyr, in her veins; and that on both sides the most terrible wrongs had been done to her ancestors by the very people with whom she had unconsciously wors.h.i.+pped; nay! by the man whose roof had given her a loving shelter, from the cradle up.

On that spot she had seen her kingly brother, in all the grandeur of a n.o.ble presence inherited from his father, blended with the softened grace of a mother, whose pure white blood softened the eagle glances of his eyes and gave a glow to his face, kindling that which would otherwise have been saturnine into the poetry of an ever changing expression.

The slave chief had been rescued from his chains in Bermuda; and after wandering over many countries, studying things that were far beyond the grasp of a mere savage, had come back to his native forests, to gather up the fragments of his people, and win back their rights, or avenge their wrongs. Night after night he had waited by those graves, under the pine tree, hoping that his sister would come and meet him.

She came at last, a thoughtful, innocent girl. The gentle romance of affection, for there could be little more in a child who remembered her mother only as she thought of her in dreams, led her to the edge of the wilderness. She went away again, wounded by a terrible knowledge--a sybil in her imagination, the pledged avenger of her mother's wrongs, and of her father's and her grandmother's murder.

Thus the son and daughter of King Philip had met, for the first time since their childhood. The boy knew that he still possessed a sister, and this thought inspired him to greater struggles. Then Abby Williams learned, from her brother's own lips, how it chanced that her brow was darker than the sunny forehead of her cousin Elizabeth; that wrong and death had scattered her family abroad, leaving her a dependent, where she should have been an avenger.

All that week the hopeless girl brooded on the terrors of her birth, and the wrongs her family had suffered; her days were one long, vague dream--her nights restless with tossing thought. Never again would she know what tranquil peace was under that roof! A journey of fifteen miles only separated her from her uncle Parris and Elizabeth, so far as s.p.a.ce was concerned; but there was no means of measuring the interminable distance that had grown up between their souls and hers in one single week.

That night she had again spoken of her parents, and expected to see her brother. During the hours that she waited, old t.i.tuba had crept to her feet, with new revelations and more startling surprises. The young girl listened, seated in the very chair that had been her mother's death-couch. She was a creature of sensitive feeling and keen imagination, a thoughtful, ardent girl, to whom such knowledge came like fire to steel, melting and hardening at the same time.

CHAPTER XXIV.

AMONG THE SHADOWS.

Now Abigail Williams sat waiting for her brother, in vague expectation, for Wahpee had given no account of his chief's movements, and Abby could only listen for the sound of his footsteps on the forest turf.

All at once, as her eyes wandered toward the woods, she heard a movement, but not in that direction. The meeting-house stood close on the verge of the forest, and the arched window, back of its pulpit, was almost touched by the swinging tree-branches. Between them and the building Abby saw a human figure moving swiftly through the gloom.

"t.i.tuba, t.i.tuba--look up," she whispered, hus.h.i.+ng her very breath, for the figure came out into the starlight, and glided toward them like a ghost.

t.i.tuba lifted her face, and held the chant trembling on her lips; they were both in the deep darkness of the pines; but the woman who came forward had the starlight on her face.

"Is it--is it my mother?" whispered Abby, prompt to believe any thing strange in the excitement of the moment. "See how sad, how beautiful she is."

t.i.tuba pressed back against her young mistress, striving to bury herself more deeply in the darkness.

"Is it my mother--or the one you loved so much?"

t.i.tuba drew a long breath, but did not answer; for the figure came close up to the two graves, and stooping down, tried to make out the moss-grown letters on the stone, tracing the outline with her fore-finger when the light proved insufficient.

"Mother!"

The word died on Abby's lips, and was carried off in the whisper of the pine leaves.

t.i.tuba lifted her hand, grasping that in Abby's lap with a warning force.