The family of Sir Richard Vines, never popular, as we have shown, with their austere neighbors, gradually withdrew themselves from all intercourse with them. Mistress Vines conceived the idea that the Bonytons and others had practiced upon poor Hope some of those terrible ordeals designed to ascertain her complicity with witchcraft, and, the ordeal having proved fatal to the victim, her death, and the tortures by which it had been accomplished, were doomed to be held a profound secret.
This idea she never relinquished, nor was she over careful in expressing her surmises, and the consequence was, a double share of animosity was visited upon the unhappy household. Acts of secret malignity were not unfrequent, and the situation of the family grew yearly more uncomfortable, till at length Sir Richard determined to leave a people by whom he was so little appreciated, and so little understood.
He found himself losing that hardihood and elasticity, which had once made peril and adventure like a bugle-call to his vigorous and buoyant spirit. He found himself wandering with John Bonyton about mountain and forest and dell, yearning with indescribable sorrow over the loss of one whose life had been so free from all that could elicit displeasure; whose simple affections and poetic fancies resembled some beautiful sprite, conjured by the poet’s dream, rather than a being of everyday life.
But it was upon John Bonyton that the blow most fearfully told, and upon him were most permanently affixed the ineffaceable marks of a life-long sorrow.
Mistress Bonyton had, from a miscalculation of her own maternal proclivities, as we have before intimated, prepared herself remorselessly to weave a fatal net around Hope Vines, caring less for the influence of Hope upon her son than did the rest of her family—her principal motive being to humble the pride of Mistress Vines, and punish her for some little neglect or discourtesy from which she conceived herself aggrieved.
But when Hope really disappeared—when no clue could really be found to her whereabouts, and when she saw her favorite son cut down and broken-hearted at the uncertainty of her fate, her womanly nature struggled through the crust of years and a warped intellect, and she was overwhelmed with remorse and regret.
Seeing the young man seated alone upon “Bass Rock,” where he and Hope had so often pursued their sport, and where she had once watched the two with fascinated interest, she laid aside her knitting, and, casting a shawl over her shoulders, went forth to talk with him, and console him, if she could.
The youth saw her approach, and waved her back; but she pressed forward, saying:
“Oh! my son, let me speak to you—comfort you, if I can.”
He looked her coldly, sternly in the eye.