As the aged demon took her way to that grave, the angel girl turned to her path of mercy. For that night the massacre was stayed. To the Indians she had appeared as a prophetess from the Great Spirit, who had laid his hand heavily upon her shoulder as a symbol of divine authority.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE ISLAND GRAVE
The morning broke, with a quiet, holy light, through the thicket of crab-apple and wild-cherry trees which overlaced the spring in the centre of the island; and there, upon the blooming turf beneath, lay the form of Catharine Montour. Her eyes were closed, and the violet tint of exhaustion lay about them. The feathers which composed her coronet were crushed in a gorgeous mass beneath her pale temple, and her forehead was contracted with a slight frown, as if the serpent coiled around it were girding her brow too tightly. Ever and anon her pale hands clutched themselves deep into the moss, and her limbs writhed in the agony of her wounds. The pale, haggard face of Grenville Murray lay upon the moss where he had fallen when she dropped away from his arms, as it had done the whole night; and Varnham, the missionary, sat a little way off, looking mournfully on them both. There was a solemn and awful sorrow in his silence; yet something of cold sternness. He could not look on that pale, haughty man so near his wife, without some thought of the evil that had been done him.
On the swell of the bank, a short distance from the spring, crouched another miserable being. Tahmeroo sat upon the ground, looking upon her mother, in dreary desolation.
The expression of pain gradually cleared from Catharine Montour’s face, and at last her eyes unclosed and turned upon Murray. She saw the death-drops on his forehead, and, struggling to her elbow, took his cold hand.
“Lady Granby, speak to me! In the name of God, I pray you, speak before it is too late. Say that I am forgiven!” he murmured.
There was a depth of agony in that voice which might have won forgiveness from the dead. Catharine Montour strove to speak, her lips moved, and her eyes filled with solemn light. Murray fell back and gave up her hand. Must he go into eternity with a doubt upon his soul!
“Caroline,” said a low, broken voice, and a face full of anguish bent over her, “forgive this man, as I do, before he dies.”
The hand which Varnham took was cold, but it moved with a faint clasp, and her eyes, which had opened again, turned with a confident and gentle expression upon the missionary’s. A soft and almost holy smile, like that which slumbers about the sweet mouth of an infant, fell upon the lips of Catharine Montour, and a pleasant murmur, which was more than forgiveness, reached the dying man’s ear.
“Great God, I thank thee that thou hast vouchsafed me the grace to forgive this man!” burst from the missionary; his face fell forward upon his bosom, and he wept aloud, as one who had found the great wish of a lifetime.