To have separated John Bonyton from Hope Vines would by no means have satisfied the malignant passions at work in the bosom of Acashee, who now aimed at the destruction of her rival, whom she would subject to a bodily torture commensurate with the jealous pangs which gnawed at her own vitals.
At the earliest dawn she made her way to the settlement, and sought out the principal leaders in the church, and, by startling revelations coupled with subtle suggestions of impending danger to the colony, through the instrumentality of evil spirits, who were to use Hope Vines as a medium, she so wrought upon their superstitious fears as to induce them to send to Boston and procure commissioners to examine into the case.
It was agreed that all should be kept a profound secret, till the commissioners should arrive, when Hope should be brought up for examination, and subjected to certain ordeals believed sufficient to test the certainty of her complicity with evil and dangerous spirits of the lower world.
Thus, while Hope, careless of the future, and easily pleased in the present, lived as the lilies do in their white loveliness, without care for the morrow, two sources of deadly peril were unconsciously hanging over her.
John Bonyton, also, despising the petty malice of his family, and superior to the superstitious belief of the colonists, treated their hints and inuendoes with contempt, or in fiery anger declared he would bring the whole race of savages from the St. Croix to the Saco to punish an injury to a thread of hair upon the head of Hope Vines.
Sir Richard Vines, with a clear, calm eye, saw that danger was at hand, and secretly made preparations to abandon a colony which he had planted with so many hopes, and seen to advance in wealth and importance.
The days of which we write were not days of feasting and merry-making, but of long, gloomy asceticism, in which men plunged into abstruse theological disquisitions with a zest and earnestness which we, in our days of easy tolerance, can hardly conceive. In England, the fires of Smithfield were not long quenched, and had been succeeded by the persecution of poor, helpless, infirm creatures, whom the ignorance or malignity of their neighbors accused of witchcraft. The arbitrary measures of Charles the First had roused into fearful action the whole middling classes of England, a class disposed to moodiness, and it may be envy of the more prosperous and volatile class then in the ascendant. All these subjects of interest abroad found a reflex in the New World, where the grandeur of the old primeval woods, the silence and solitude surrounding the scattered colonists, augmented the natural gloom of asperity and religious fervor.
The family of Sir Richard Vines, more cheerful and more allied to the Cavalier than Roundhead interests of England, found themselves looked upon with distrust upon more grounds than one, by their more religiously exacting compatriots, whose sympathies were, without any disguise, on the side of Cromwell and the parliament.
The people of the colony met almost daily for prayer and exhortation, which became a grim sort of relaxation and amusement to them. Young and old affected religious fervor, till it became the habit of the mind, to the exclusion of the more social and genial aspects of human intercourse.
The ship was now ready for sailing which was to convey John Bonyton to a distant shore, and inaugurate with him a broader sphere of life and action. He had, with the natural enthusiasm of youth and courage, dwelt upon the change before him, till already he had grasped the pinnacle of renown and achieved wealth and manly distinction. His bearing assumed a nobleness accordant with his new-born aspirations, and few had ever beheld a handsomer youth.