"Yes, yes, the old women tell us stories of his cruelty."
"And of his wrongs, of his courage, his wonderful magnanimity, his noble statesmanship—do they tell you nothing of this?"
"No; only of his cruelties."
"And your heart, how does that receive the lie? calmly, or bursting with indignation?"
"My heart aches within me when I hear these legends—aches and burns as if a wound at its core were rudely touched."
"Ah! and there is a wound, a cruel wound, deep in your life. It shall spread and burn through your whole being. Listen: These Englishmen voted themselves munitions of war, raised regiments, linked colony to colony, and made each settlement the rivet of a chain which swept the coast. Their bravest men took the field—the whole country was astir. These very preparations were a tribute to the heroism they were intended to crush—all this force was brought against the kingly savage. He met it bravely where courage was most likely to prevail; cautiously where prudence promised to husband human life. He seized upon their own tactics, and turned them in his favor; marched, countermarched, and manœuvred as no general of Europe has ever done. This queen went side by side with him upon the war-path. She was his council, the companion of his danger. There was not a warrior in the tribe who would have refused to lay down his life for her. But why tell you this history? You know how the strong man was betrayed by a traitor, murdered in cold blood, hacked limb from limb. Oh, Great Spirit, hear me, and kindle in her breast the rage that consumes mine! Listen, girl: His wife and son were taken prisoners; the wife of King Philip was dragged out of the forest with her son at her side and the last-born in her arms!
"Again the magnates of the church sat in judgment upon her. A ship lay on the coast, a battered old vessel bound for Bermuda. This brave woman could not be trusted in the country—the ship would bear her and her children into slavery. The wife and children of a king were taken from the broad forest, with its fresh winds and sumptuous leafiness, and condemned to herd with negroes and slaves under a tropic sun. That night, no one could ever tell how, the wife of Philip escaped from her captors, and fled with her youngest child, a little girl scarcely yet three years old. That child inherited its mother's beauty, its father's lofty pride, and the solemn obligations of Anna Hutchinson's curse."
Again Abigail felt the cold chills creeping over her.
"Ah me!" she muttered, "that terrible inheritance—better that the child had died."
"Better that the child had died than avenge such wrongs—a grandmother's butchery, a father's murder, stripes and slavery for the mother, chains, hard labor, brutal blows for the young boy—better that she had died! Wretched girl, unsay these words!"