“She is left to me a little longer—I could have blessed him when he said it.”
Mary heard these words as the extraordinary woman passed, and her pure heart ached for the unhappy mother.
Butler remained on the rock till Catharine Montour had entirely disappeared; then he darted down the hill, and before Mary dared to venture forth from her concealment, his canoe was cutting across the river toward Monockonok Island.
Mary stood almost petrified with astonishment when she saw the direction he was taking. “What had Walter Butler to do in the vicinity of her home?” Her heart throbbed painfully as she connected this question with the conversation which she had overheard between her sister and Edward Clark, on the previous day. She stood motionless till his canoe shot into the little cove where her own was always moored, and when a sharp whistle sounded from that direction, she bent breathlessly forward with her eyes fixed intently on the door of her own dwelling. It opened, and her sister, Jane, came out with her sun-bonnet in her hand, and walked swiftly toward the cove.
But the poor deformed girl pressed her hands hard upon her heart, and groaned aloud, when her suspicions were thus painfully confirmed. She sank upon the ground, and burying her face in her hands, prayed fervently and with an earnestness of purpose that brought something of relief to her fears. For half an hour she sat upon the rock with her pale face looking toward the island, watching the cove through the tears which almost blinded. Her silent, anxious sorrow was more like that of an angel grieving over the apostasy of a sister spirit, than that of a mortal suffering under the conviction of moral wrong in a beloved object. She saw her sister slowly return to the house, and remarked that she stopped more than once to look after Walter Butler, as he urged his canoe toward the precipice again. Mary buried her face in her hands, and held her breath, as his footsteps smote along the neighboring path, and were lost in the forest.
Campbell’s Ledge and Scoville’s Island
Catharine Montour sat in the door of her lodge at the foot of Campbell’s Ledge. The encampment was almost deserted. Few women ever followed the warriors when they were called to a distant council-fire, and the men had gone into the forests on the opposite shore of the river, to meet their brethren from the Wind gap. The Tories from about Fort Wintermoot were to join the council, and from her high lodge Catharine could see a hundred council-fires gleaming out from the dense foliage which clothed the opposite hill.
The night was overcast, the moon and stars floated in soft gray vapors overhead, or were covered with black clouds sometimes sending pale ghastly gleams upon the mountains, and again whelming everything in darkness. Catharine was accustomed to the gloom of the forest, and her spirit always rose to meet the storms that swept over it; but now there was really no tempest, nothing but sombre stillness all around. The winds muttered and moaned along the mountain side. The waters rushed heavily down the valley, and those council-fires were suggestive of scenes more gloomy still. Like the black clouds overhead, they were full of brooding destruction.
But more sombre than all was the heart of Catharine Montour. On the morrow she was to resign all right over her only child to a man against whom her whole soul revolted. A bad, cruel man, whose name had even now become a terror wherever his foot had trod. She knew well that his influence among the Indians had always been pernicious; that as the war of the Revolution gathered strength, he had instigated the various savage tribes to participate in the contest and urged on cruelties that even savage warfare had not yet invented. A thousand times would that woman have died rather than given her daughter up to his wicked power, but here her supremacy was at fault. Tahmeroo loved the man, and the mother had suffered so bitterly in her own life from thwarted affection, that she dared not interpose a stern authority over the wishes of her child, otherwise the heathenish bond that already united those two persons would have been rent asunder, though she had died in the effort.