Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith

“ Is his voice heard at the council-fire to-night? Will his cry ever wake the echoes in the forest again? No. He went forth, on the first day of the moon, to fight the sneaking pale-faces, and yesterday he fell into an ambush, and the great warrior, Cosama the brave, the Quivering Spear, died by the hand of a squaw. Wah! The wigwam of Rice-stalk is empty; no more shall the voice of Cosama bid his woman go fetch the game in the forest; no more shall his boy run to meet him on the edge of the wood, and learn to be a brave at the sound of his voice. ”

“ Acashee did not fly. On the contrary, she boldly stood out upon the headland, and it was a grand sight, the tall, fearless woman in her proud attitude, standing there courting the death she had inflicted.
“Acashee is avenged, John Bonyton,” she cried; but her voice was stopped by a hundred arrows, hurtling the air, and penetrating her flesh—“blood from every pore,” as Hope predicted. She did not quail, but, with a buoyant motion of feet and arms, she sung her death-song:
“Look from your misty caves, heroes and warriors! ”

“ She spoke at first with pride, gradually softening her tones to a tender, caressing beseechingness, which might have been dangerous to one less steadfast than John Bonyton.
“Cease, I beseech thee, Acashee. I have no choice but to love Hope Vines.”
“Listen to what I tell you,” she cried, fiercely. “Hope Vines shall not be your wife while the sea rolls, or the sun shines. She shall be burned for a witch. She shall know what it is to bring the blush of shame and the blight of scorn upon the cheek of Acashee.”
With a wild look of rage and malevolence, she dashed into the forest. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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!” ”

“ While the sagamore thus poured out his poetic rhapsody with beaming eyes, and looks unutterably tender, Hope’s dreamy eyes were fixed on the vapors circling the falls, which were ever and anon swept aside by the gusty wind which stirred in the bare branches of the trees. It was evident that much in the mind of her lover was to her a sealed book. Perhaps John Bonyton felt something of the kind. Who has not, at some time, poured out the unfathomed wealth of a soul upon an arid desert! ”

“ Look at the eye so dark and terrible! My heart, my brain, has been filled with but one thought, and that is John Bonyton. Look into my soul, it has but one record—only one record—John Bonyton; but you—you are great, powerful, beautiful. Hope is nothing—nothing!”
Her voice was lost in tears, and if the strong man felt the truth of what she said, he was not the less tender, nor the less fervent in his protestations of unchanged and unchanging love. ”

“ I can not live to see thee look with a weary heart—a half-heart, upon the Hope who is all thine.”
While the solitary child, pure as the unnamed crystal that hung from the cave in which she had been so long immured, gave expression to that untutored tenderness which she felt was to be a dream of the past, the sagamore suddenly started forward, and pointed to a high rock by the margin of the falls, upon which appeared the tall figure of Acashee. Hope saw her with a faint smile, which was not lost upon her lover. ”

“ Hope, you are too idle, and too wild—no better than a wild Indian. You are a very unmaidenly girl, fit for nothing good. Why do you not sit bolt upright in high-backed chairs, as your sisters do? Look at them! How nice they are! Not a hair of the head out of place. Hear them make ugly sounds on a hollow board! See how ashamed they are of you, Hope! You are a grief to us all, Hope, indeed you are. To-day John Bonyton pulled you out of the water like a fish. ”

“ The smoke of the little hamlet rose dreamily upon the air, and the light tinkle of the herd-bell mingled with the lowing of kine and the faint echo of the ax of the woodman.
Often had Hope Vines paddled her light canoe across the Saco to meet her upon this upland, and here, with John Bonyton, they had idled away the long summer days, unconscious of that dreamy future which had now made life a desert to them all. ”

“ They lifted up their hands aghast at the fearful spectacle—they leaped from rock to rock in fierce efforts to extinguish the fatal blaze, but in vain. The burning hemlock towered in fearful splendor, sending forth jets of flame, an object of beauty no less than of terror. And now the Saco warriors, rushing from their ambush, dealt sure [95] destruction upon all but Acashee, who stood unmoved and unharmed. In vain did she invite the blow, by chanting in a voice which rose above the roar of the falls and the roar of the beacon-fire, her fiery death-song—she stood unharmed. ”

“ The sagamore plunged into the recesses of the forest, and at length emerged upon the river-bank, where, as boy and youth, he had idled his days in that ecstatic dream of love and youth, which so fills up the soul that the past is forgotten, the future hung with rainbow clouds, pavilioned with golden vaults and silvery sheen, thus exalting the glow of the present by an onward gorgeous perspective. ”

“ For years John Bonyton lingered about the falls, in the vain desire of seeing once more the pale, spectral beauty of Hope Vines, but she appeared no more in the flesh.
Tradition delights to recall her story, and to this day, men not romantic nor visionary declare to have seen a figure, slight and beautiful, clad in snowy robes, with moccasined feet, and hair covering her form like a vail, moving sorrowfully about the falls, and the strange figure they believe to be the wraith of Hope Vines. ”

“ Unconsciously he had cast himself down by the wigwam of the prophet of the tribe. It was the custom of the Indians to build the tent or wigwam of those whose duty it was to watch all omens bearing upon the welfare of the people, in some secluded spot within the sound of great falls, or in proximity to some natural cave or grotto, where they might, undisturbed, exercise their spells and incantations. A hand, cold, and wasted by fastings nearly to the bone, was laid upon the shoulder of the sagamore. ”

“ Years are annihilated, and we are children once more, gathering pebbles on the beach and blossoms in the woods!”
“Let me go, John Bonyton!” cried Hope, convulsively, at these words.
“No, never again! We will live the old life—the life of which we dreamed years ago, Hope.”
[94]
A faint smile played over the lips of the girl, but she whispered:
“When the torch is consumed to ashes, no power can rekindle the flame.”
“Do not speak despairingly, Hope. We will not rejoin those cold, hard hypocrites whom we both abhor. No, no; look up, my child; take heart, dear heart. ”

“ Acashee laughed bitterly.
“You do not like skake (snake) ; you will be called Wa-ain (white soul) , and be a great medicine-woman; but you are no more than a skake at the best. Get up, I say; the warriors are coming!”
Still there was neither movement nor reply, and the woman continued, in a sharper tone:
“Hope Vines, I bid thee come and eat!”
The figure slowly lifted itself up, and looked wistfully, and yet half defiantly, at the speaker.
“Acashee, I will answer only to my own name.”
“As you like. Skake is as good as Acashee. But the spider snares even the snake.” ”

“ 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 [88] people, she yielded to the romance which surrounded her with something more than content. ”

“ And Custaloga, the brave and devoted Wyandot, did love Amy with all the wild ardor of his half-tamed nature—loved her, too, without hope, without future, without an idea that his love could ever be aught save a dream—and thus, perhaps, had his affection risen to the greater hight, as it was invested with a melancholy and sadness, which to his wayward nature, but half conquered by education, was not without its charm. ”

“ Perseverance eyed Nancy with a malignant smile, whereat the latter, nothing daunted, replied:
“Many a godly youth has been led astray, but when he returns, and saith ‘I have sinned,’ it shall not be accounted to him.”
“Thou art of a goodly speech, Nancy, and I thank thee,” returned Dame Higgins.
“There, did you see that?” cried Perseverance, with a sudden start. “Upon my life, Hope Vines jumped off that cliff, the whole hight, and then walked home as if nothing had happened. No goat can do such a thing without help of some kind. ”

“ Knowing the atrocious plan concocted beneath it, of charging Hope with witchcraft, he could not endure the sight of those whose cruelty he abhorred, and whose hypocrisy was too apparent to be excused.
Finding no sympathy with the colonists, he finally entirely estranged himself from them, and passed his whole time with the Saco Indians. Their simple truth, their loyalty to a friend, no less than their hatred to a foe, harmonized with the broad shades of his own character, and he learned a peace with them which his own people denied 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. ”

“ 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 [87] 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!” ”

“ But Custaloga moved along with the unerring instinct of a woodman, one of the first features of whose woodcraft was to find his way where no man else could guide himself. When one has become in some degree accustomed to the forest and the prairie, it is singular with what ease he penetrates in a direct line through wilds where there seems no guide.
But the moss on the trees, the pebbles in the path, the color of the bark, the twinkling of a star, the point of a rock, are indications to the hunter as sure as sign-post or road. ”

“ Nothing can be conceived more daintily picturesque than the scenery surrounding the Pool. There are no marshes—no malaria of fogs; all is fresh, clear white sand—a long ocean reach, and the grand overhanging woods giving a pathway to the resounding Saco, or broken here and there by esplanades of green meadows, where the deer and her young disport themselves, and the beaver constructs his half-human habitation. ”

“ To a stranger, Hope might have seemed but a mere child, and yet the mouth showed that a woman’s thoughts and passions had been there and the eye was a well of deep, fathomless emotions, while the grasp of the little hand showed that no child’s fiber restricted its power. ”

“ The wounded doe seeks the deepest covert in which to die.”
She turned away, but the sagamore, rushing forward, folded her in his arms, saying:
“You must not leave me, Hope; do you not love me?”
She answered by a low wail, more eloquent than words, and it was long before her sobs allowed her utterance. At length, she looked up with a wistful, earnest gaze, and answered:
“I see it all now, John Bonyton. I see that Hope is a child, you are man. Hear me say it all—I am a child such as I was years ago; you are not the John Bonyton who played with pebbles upon the beach. Look at the eagle-plume! ”