Angry with his weakness, the young man turned from her and dashed away into the woods.
When Barbara awoke in the morning, for fatigue made her sleep heavy, she inquired for the young man. The Indians answered that he had gone deeper into the wilderness, where the main body of his tribe lay, and when a cabin was prepared for her reception, he would come back again; till then the five warriors whom he had left behind would protect her with their lives.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
TAKEN CAPTIVE.
Samuel Parris bore his daughter home and laid her on her own white bed, where she writhed like a wounded fawn in the snow. Her face was rosy with flushes, that came and went like gleams of light on marble; her lips were in constant motion; she muttered continually about Barbara Stafford and Norman Lovel. Sometimes she called aloud for her mother, and declared with child-like earnestness that she saw her gliding through the room with her golden hair smoothed under a close cap, and a white dress sweeping around her like the wings of an angel.
The old minister listened to all this in stern sorrow. His ewe lamb was smitten down before his eyes: God had suffered his idolatrous love to find a terrible punishment. What could he do? how act to save that beautiful one from perdition?
Norman Lovel was sad. Barbara Stafford had disappeared like a myth. His approach seemed to have driven her away, and he found Elizabeth, from whom he had parted in anger, writhing on a bed of pain, muttering her wild fancies and crying aloud for help.
Abigail Williams moved about coldly and in breathless silence. The curse of witchcraft was upon the house, hatred and death clung around it like cerecloths to a coffin. What if she, too, were possessed—the story of old Tituba, a device of the Evil One, and the young chief so wildly beautiful, who claimed relationship with her, the arch fiend himself? The very foundations of her reason seemed shaken by these doubts, and as the moans and cries of Elizabeth reached her ear from time to time, she would pause in her work and stand motionless like a block of marble, till some new sound startled her into life again.
All night Samuel Parris sat by the bedside of his child, pallid and thoughtful. Over and again he questioned her in the midst of her wild speeches, as a judge sifts the words of a doubtful witness. Sometimes he fell into audible prayer, and again sat in dull silence pondering gloomily.