Mrs. Parris stood looking at them both, then, struck with a pang of terrible anguish, she crept out of the room, moaning as she went.
CHAPTER XI.
DOOMED TO SLAVERY.
While Mrs. Parris was in her chamber, faint with pain and driven wild by the fearful developments just made to her, the dead woman lay in the great easy-chair, wrapped in her gorgeous forest-dress and with the bright hair falling in masses down her cheek, concealing the death shadows that lay upon it.
All was still as midnight in the house. Save for a faint sob that came once or twice from the chamber above, the pretty cabin might have been taken for a tomb. Old Tituba had been very busy at the great stone oven, back of the house, baking bread, and that fearful scene had passed in the parlor without her knowledge. Though a soul had gone into eternity, and a heart had been broken, in those few minutes, the poor old savage was ignorant of it all. With her long iron shovel she was launching great loaves of rye bread into the depths of an enormous oven, and at last blocked up its yawning mouth with an earthen milk-pan full of beans, crested with a crisp mass of pork cut in square blocks across the rind. She had put the great wooden door up, and was stuffing tufts of grass about the edges to keep the air out, when a lad rushed wildly by her, leaping over the ground like a deer, and, turning a corner of the house, disappeared. The lad was dressed in a deer-skin tunic, trimmed so richly with wampum that it rattled like a hail storm as he fled. She caught one glimpse of a mass of glossy hair floating on the wind, and scarlet leggins hanging in shreds around those flying feet.
"It is an Indian child. It is one of our people," cried Tituba, casting her heavy iron fire-shovel to the ground. "The white men are on his track; they swarm like snakes in the forest."
But, quickly as the old woman moved, that wild Indian boy entered the house before she came up. He halted one moment on the threshold, hesitating and wild. A glance at the great easy-chair, a cry that rang through and through the house, a leap that seemed rather that of some wild animal than a human being, and the boy lay prostrate at the dead woman's feet, with both hands pulling at her dress, while he cried out, in a voice that made the very air tremble with its pathos,
"Mother! mother! I am here! I am here! They could not hold me! I tore their bonds asunder like tow. I shot one through the heart, outran the others. All night long have I been on your trail. Look at me, mother. Wake up or the enemy will be upon us again."
A stir in the woman's garments that shook all its wampum fringes, deceived the boy, or he would have known that she was dead.