For a time this brave girl and her sister were received and kindly treated by the inhabitants, but after a year or two it came out that, even in the wilderness, she had imbibed, no one could tell how, those Quaker heresies so obnoxious to the prevailing religionists. Becoming more and more bold in declaring them, she had been driven forth into the wilderness again, cruelly scourged by the law, and hunted down by her fellow-men like a she-wolf caught at her prey.
The younger child, to whom all religious creeds remained a blessed mystery, was forcibly torn from the arms of her sister, whose very touch was considered contagious by the regenerated, and adopted into the church. She was too young at the time of her sister's martyrdom, for such in spirit it was, to resist either this cruelty or kindness, and the very people who had hunted her sister out of civilized life were the most eager for her welfare, and strove most diligently to render her happy and comfortable. Indeed, she was in reality the ewe lamb of the church, and, being of a peaceful, gentle nature, soon learned to look upon the troubles of her first childhood as a dream, and think of the brave sister, who had been ready to perish for her, as one of the characters that she loved to read about in the Bible.
Thus she surrounded the past with a sort of religious mystery, which threw a shade of sadness over her whole life, but never, till the very last, embittered it as a knowledge of the whole truth would have done.
This young girl became to the church a lamb of atonement for her sister's heresy. She grew up beautiful as an angel, both in soul and body; became the wife of Samuel Parris, the mother of his child, and then, in truth, an angel.
But a thing happened on the very day before her death, which no human being ever understood save the young wife, whose death-blow came with the knowledge it brought.
She was sitting alone, this young wife, in the spare room of her log house, singing a quiet, sweet psalm-tune to herself, as she sewed on a little garment which was to clothe her first-born child. The minister had gone forth to hold a prayer-meeting, and she was thus pleasantly whiling the time of his absence away, thinking of him with a gentle satisfaction that more passionate love might not have known, between the pauses of her work and the breaks in her sweet music.
It was in the spring; the little window of her room was curtained with wild honeysuckles and sweetbriar brought down from the woods, and rooted by the house. The sash was up, and the wind, as it sighed through the leaves, gave a melodious accompaniment to her voice. But all at once, there was a quick rustling of the branches, as if they were torn apart by force, and, looking up suddenly, the young wife saw a thin brown hand clutching the thorny foliage, and a ghastly face, fired by two burning eyes, looking in upon her.
Mrs. Parris started up in great terror, for in her whole nature she was timid, and would have fled to the kitchen; but while she stood trembling and doubtful, the face disappeared, the outer door flew open, and a woman leading a child by the hand came hastily into the room.
Mrs. Parris gazed at the intruder with renewed affright. Though clad as a savage, with moccasins on her feet, leggins of crimson cloth, and a dress of deer skin, gorgeous with embroidery in beads, porcupine quills, and stained grasses, she had nothing of the Indian in her countenance or complexion. The hair that fell down from a broken coronet of feathers, which had once been gorgeous, was of a rich golden tint, and curled in heavy masses, though the woman had reached mid-age in fact, and was much older in appearance.
The eyes which she fixed on the young wife, though wild with the fires of death, had once been blue as a summer sky.