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?”
“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?”
“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 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?”
“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 aclear 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 ownpeople, 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.