Tituba dropped down at Abby's feet, and gathering her limbs together, began a low chant, that mingled in the shiver of the pine leaves with inexpressible mournfulness.
Abby leaned her head against the trunk of the pine and listened. Strange to say, that chant, instead of depressing, kindled her spirit. She never came to that spot, and heard the mysterious whispering of the leaves, without a wish for action, an unaccountable desire to plunge into the wilderness and remain there forever. Only one week before, she had wandered to the same spot, and there, for the first time, learned from his own lips that she had a brother; that the blood of King Philip mingled with that of Anna Hutchinson, the martyr, in her veins; and that on both sides the most terrible wrongs had been done to her ancestors by the very people with whom she had unconsciously worshipped; nay! by the man whose roof had given her a loving shelter, from the cradle up.
On that spot she had seen her kingly brother, in all the grandeur of a noble presence inherited from his father, blended with the softened grace of a mother, whose pure white blood softened the eagle glances of his eyes and gave a glow to his face, kindling that which would otherwise have been saturnine into the poetry of an ever changing expression.
The slave chief had been rescued from his chains in Bermuda; and after wandering over many countries, studying things that were far beyond the grasp of a mere savage, had come back to his native forests, to gather up the fragments of his people, and win back their rights, or avenge their wrongs. Night after night he had waited by those graves, under the pine tree, hoping that his sister would come and meet him.
She came at last, a thoughtful, innocent girl. The gentle romance of affection, for there could be little more in a child who remembered her mother only as she thought of her in dreams, led her to the edge of the wilderness. She went away again, wounded by a terrible knowledge—a sybil in her imagination, the pledged avenger of her mother's wrongs, and of her father's and her grandmother's murder.
Thus the son and daughter of King Philip had met, for the first time since their childhood. The boy knew that he still possessed a sister, and this thought inspired him to greater struggles. Then Abby Williams learned, from her brother's own lips, how it chanced that her brow was darker than the sunny forehead of her cousin Elizabeth; that wrong and death had scattered her family abroad, leaving her a dependent, where she should have been an avenger.
All that week the hopeless girl brooded on the terrors of her birth, and the wrongs her family had suffered; her days were one long, vague dream—her nights restless with tossing thought. Never again would she know what tranquil peace was under that roof! A journey of fifteen miles only separated her from her uncle Parris and Elizabeth, so far as space was concerned; but there was no means of measuring the interminable distance that had grown up between their souls and hers in one single week.
That night she had again spoken of her parents, and expected to see her brother. During the hours that she waited, old Tituba had crept to her feet, with new revelations and more startling surprises. The young girl listened, seated in the very chair that had been her mother's death-couch. She was a creature of sensitive feeling and keen imagination, a thoughtful, ardent girl, to whom such knowledge came like fire to steel, melting and hardening at the same time.