CHAPTER XII.
The work of that day was the death of George Burroughs. The unhappy allusion that he made to the knife, just before he stopped so suddenly and fixed his eyes upon a young female who sat near him with her back to the light, and her face muffled up so that nobody knew her till after she had gone away, was now in every body’s mouth. She was the sister of Rachel Dyer, and her name was Mary Elizabeth; after Mary Dyer and Elizabeth Hutchinson. It was now concluded that what he knew of the perjury of the witnesses, of the sheet and of the knife, he had been told by Mary Elizabeth or by Rachel Dyer, who had been watching him all the livelong day, from a part of the house, where the shadow of a mighty tree fell so as to darken all the faces about her.
It was Rachel Dyer who spoke out with a voice of authority and reproved him for a part of his wild speech. And it was Rachel Dyer who came up to his very side, when he was in array against the judges and the elders and the people, and stood there and spoke to him without fear; while Mary Elizabeth sat by her side with her hands locked in her lap, and her blue eyes fixed in despair upon the earth.
Nor were the people mistaken; for what he knew of the forgery, he did know from Rachel Dyer, and from Mary Elizabeth Dyer, the two quaker women whose holy regard for truth, young as they were, made theirsimple asseveration of more value than the oath of most people. To them was he indebted for the knowledge, though he was not suffered to speak of it—for the times were not ripe enough, that even as the knife-blade was, the spindle and the sheet were, a wicked forgery; and the sign that he made to Elizabeth Dyer, when he stopped in the middle of his speech, and the look of sorrow and love which accompanied his endeavor to appease her frightful agitation, as she sat there gasping for breath and clinging to Rachel’s garb, were enough to betray the truth to everybody that saw them.
It was fatal to him, that look of sorrow and love, and ere long it was fatal to another, to one who loved him with a love so pure and so high as to be without reproach, even while it was without hope; and it would have been fatal to another in spite of her loveliness, but for the wonderful courage of her ... the heroine of our story, whose behavior throughout a course of sore and bitter trial which continued day after day, and month after month, and year after year, deserves to be perpetuated in marble. No hero ever endured so much—no man ever yet suffered as that woman suffered, nor as a multitude of women do, that we pass by every hour, without so much as a look of pity or a word of kindness to cheer them onward in their path of sorrow and suffering. If God ever made a heroine, Rachel Dyer was a heroine—a heroine without youth or beauty, with no shape to please, with no color to charm the eye, with no voice to delight the ear.
But enough—let us go to our story. Before the sun rose again after the trial of poor Martha, the conspirators of death were on the track of new prey, and fear and mischief were abroad with a new shape. And before the sun rose again, the snare was laid for a preacher of the gospel, and before a month was over, theydragged him away to the scaffold of death, scoffing at his piety and ridiculing his lofty composure, and offered him up a sacrifice to the terrible infatuation of the multitude. But before we take up the story of his death, a word or two of his life. It was full of wayward and strange adventure.
He appears to have been remarkable from his earliest youth for great moral courage, great bodily power, enthusiastic views, and a something which broke forth afterwards in what the writers of the day allude to, as an extraordinary gift of speech. He was evidently a man of superior genius, though of a distempered genius, fitful, haughty and rash. “He appeared on earth,” says an old writer of America, “about a hundred years too soon. What he was put to death for in 1692, he may be renowned for (if it please the Lord) in 1792, should this globe (of which there is now small hope, on account of the wars and rumors of wars, and star-shooting that we see) hold together so long.”
He was not a large man, but his activity and strength were said to be unequalled. He went about every where among the nations of the earth; he grew up in the midst of peril and savage warfare; and at one period of his life, his daily adventures were so strange, so altogether beyond what other men are likely to meet with, even while they are abroad in search of adventure, that if they were told in the simple language of truth, and precisely as they occurred, they would appear unworthy of belief. The early part of his life, he spent among a people who made war night and day for their lives, and each man for himself—the men of Massachusetts-Bay, who did so, for about a hundred and fifty years after they went ashore on the rocks of New-Plymouth—putting swords upon the thighs of their preachers, and Bibles into the hands of their soldiers, whithersoeverthey went, by day or by night, for sleep, for battle or for prayer.
On account of his birth, he was brought up to the church, with a view to the conversion of a tribe to which his father belonged: Constituted as he was, he should have been a warrior. He made poetry; and he was a strong and beautiful writer: He should have made war—he might have been a leader of armies—a legislator—a statesman—a deliverer. Had he appeared in the great struggle for North-American liberty, fourscore years later, he probably would have been all this.
He never knew his father; and he was dropped by his mother, as he said, in the heart of the wilderness, like the young of the wild-beast; but he escaped the bear and the wolf, and the snake, and was bred a savage, among savages, who while he was yet a child, put him upon the track of his unnatural mother, and bid him pursue her. He did pursue her with the instinct of a blood-pup, and found her, and fell upon her neck and forgave her and kissed her, and wept with her, and stood by her in the day of her trouble. On her death-bed she told him her story. She had been carried away captive by the Indians while she was yet a child. She grew up to their customs and married a warrior who was descended from a white man. Of that marriage the boy about her neck was born. She had no other child, but she was very happy until she saw the Rev. Mr. Elliot of Plymouth, a man who seeing others of the church occupied in warfare and cruel strife, turned his back upon the white men that he loved, and struck into the woods of the north, and went about every where preaching the gospel to the savages and translating precious books for them, such as “Primers, catechisms, the practice of piety, Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, several of Mr. Shepard’s composures, and at length theBible itself, which was printed the first time in their language in 1664, and a second time, not long after, with the corrections of Mr. Cotton, minister of Plymouth.” After meeting with Mr. Elliot, who soon added her to his Indian church, and filled her heart with fear about original sin, faith, free grace and a future life, she grew melancholy; and being assured that her brave wild husband, a chief who hated the white man with a hatred passing that of the red men, would never permit her to preach or pray if he knew it, she forsook him and fled for refuge to New-Plymouth—her boy, whom she could not bear to leave with his pagan father, strapped to her back, and her soul supported by the prayers of the true church. For a time she doated on the boy, for a time she was all that a mother could be; but before a twelvemonth was over, perceiving that she was regarded by the whites, and by the women especially (her sisterhood of the church) as unworthy to associate with them because of the babe, and because of the father, whose lineage they said was that of Anti-Christ and the scarlet-woman, she took to prayer anew, and bethought herself anew of the wrath of God—her Father—and resolving to purify herself as with fire, because of what she had been to the savages—a wife and a mother, she strapped the boy on her back once more, and set off a-foot and alone to seek the hut of his wild father;—and having found it she kissed her boy, and laid him at his father’s door in the dead of night, and came away with a joyous heart and a free step, as if now—now, that the little heathen was in a fair way of being devoured by the wolf or the wild hog, under the very tree which overhung the very spot of green earth where she had begun to love his father, as he lay asleep in the shadow, after a day of severe toil—she had nothing more to do to be saved.
The father died in battle before the boy had strength enough to draw a child’s arrow to the head. The boy went in pursuit of his mother at the age of twelve, and by her he was taught the lessons of a new faith. She persuaded him to leave the tribe of his father, to forsake the wild men who were not of the true church, and to come out from the shadow of the wilderness. The whites aware of the value of such a youth and of the use he might be in their bold scheme for the overthrow of Indian power throughout all North America—the spread of the Gospel of truth and peace and charity, as they called it—added their solicitation to hers. But no—no—the brave boy withstood them all, he would neither be bribed nor flattered, nor trapped, nor scared; nor was he, till he saw his poor mother just ready to die. But then he gave up—he threw aside the bow and the arrow, he tore off the rich beaver dress that he wore, buried the tomahawk, offered up the bright weapons of death along with the bright wages of death, on the altar of a new faith—prayed his mother to look up and live and be happy, and betook himself with such fervor and security to the Bible, that he came to be regarded, while yet a youth, as a new hope for the church that had sprung up from the blood of the martyrs.
He married while he was yet a boy. At the age of twenty, he was a widower. At the age of twenty-four he was a widower again, with a new love at his heart which he dared not avow—for how could he hope that another would be found to overlook his impure lineage; now that two had died, he believed in his own soul, a sacrifice to the bitter though mute persecution they had to endure for marrying with one who was not altogether a white man? a love which accelerated his death, for till the name of Elizabeth Dyer came to be associated with his, after the trial of Martha Cory, the wretchedwomen, who had acquired such power by their pretended sufferings, were able to forgive his reproof, his enquiry, and his ridicule of what they swore to, whenever they opened their lips to charge anybody with witchcraft. From the day of the trial it was not so. They forgave him for nothing, after they saw how much he loved Mary Elizabeth Dyer. And yet, he was no longer what he had been—he was neither handsome nor youthful now; and they who reproached others for loving him when he was both, why should they pursue him as they did, when the day of his marvellous beauty and strength was over? when his hair was already touched with snow, and his high forehead and haughty lip with care? Merely because he appeared to love another.
He had been a preacher at Salem till after the death of his first wife, where he had a few praying Indians and a few score of white people under his charge. They were fond of him, and very proud of him (for he was the talk of the whole country) till, after her death, being seized with a desire to go away—to escape for a time, he cared not how nor whither, from the place where he had been so very happy and for so short a period, he left his flock; and went eastward, and married anew—and was a widower again—burying a second wife; the second he had so loved, and so parted from, without a wish to outlive her—and then he crossed the sea, and traversed the whole of Europe, and after much trial and a series of strange vicissitude, came back—though not to the church he had left, but to the guardianship of another a great way off.
He could bear to live—and that was all; he could not bear to stay, year after year, by the grave where the women that he so loved were both asleep in their youth and beauty—and he forbidden to go near them. But he prospered no more—so say the flock he deserted,when he went away forever from the church he had built up, and took refuge again among the people of Casco Bay, at Falmouth—a sweet place, if one may judge by what it is now, with its great green hill and smooth blue water, and a scattered group of huge pine trees on the north side. It was a time of war when he arrived at Falmouth, and the Indians were out, backed by a large body of the French and commanded by a French officer, the Sieur Hertel, a man of tried valor and great experience in the warfare of the woods. At the village of Casco Bay, there was a little fort, or block house, into which about a hundred men with their wives and little ones were gathered together, waiting the attack of their formidable and crafty foe, when the preacher appeared.
There was no time to throw away—they were but a handful to the foe, afar from succor and beyond the reach of sympathy. He saw this, and he told them there was no hope, save that which pious men feel, however they may be situated, and that nothing on earth could save them but their own courage and a prayerful assiduity. They were amazed at his look, for he shewed no sign of fear when he said this, and they gathered about him and hailed him as their hope and refuge; the servant of the Lord, their Joshua, and the captain of their salvation, while he proceeded to speak as if he had been familiar with war from his boyhood.
For weeks before the affair came to issue, he and they slept upon their arms. They never had their clothes off by night nor by day, nor did they move beyond the reach of their loaded guns. If they prayed now, it was not as it had been before his arrival in a large meeting-house and all together, with their arms piled or stacked at the door, and the bullet-pouch and powder-horn, wherever it might please the Lord,—but they prayedtogether, a few at a time, with sentries on the watch now, with every gun loaded and every knife sharpened, with every bullet-pouch and every powder-horn slung where it should be; and they prayed now as they had never prayed before—as if they knew that when they rose up, it would be to grapple man to man with the savages.
At last on a very still night in the month of May, one of the two most beautiful months of the year in that country of rude weather, a horseman who was out on the watch, perceived a solitary canoe floating by in the deep shadow of the rocks, which overhung the sea beneath his feet. Before he had time to speak, or to recollect himself, he heard a slight whizzing in the air, and something which he took for a bird flew past him—it was immediately followed by another, at which his horse reared—and the next moment a large arrow struck in a tree just over his head. Perceiving the truth now, the horseman set off at full speed for the fort, firing into the canoe as he darted away, and wondering at his narrow escape after the flight of two such birds, and the twang of a bowstring at his very ear.