“Go, mother, go! I have not slept beneath your roof since I learned this. I never shall again. Better the bare rock and the cold mountain dew than to dwell with hypocrites and murderers.”
“John, do not curse me; do not leave my gray hairs to sorrow, to death.”
“I curse you not. Oh, mother, there is no love, no kindness in the hearts of these people.”
“Only conform to them, John—only be one of them, and you will find every heart open to receive you.”
“Never—never, mother! I know what they had designed to inflict upon Hope Vines. Had she lived—had she been here, and a hand been laid upon her, the blood that would have followed would be upon your head, not mine.”
He lifted himself up and strode away, leaving the conscience-stricken woman to weep and wring her hands alone. Her daughter came and bore her home, but Mistress Bonyton was no more the proud, scheming woman she once had been. If Mistress Vines wept for her daughter, Mistress Bonyton was made to shed more bitter tears at the alienation of her son.
Sometimes the latter, in his long days and weeks’ search for the lost girl, abandoned the settlement altogether, and lived in the wigwams of the simple savages, who did all in their power to comfort and console him. The Saco tribe was no less ignorant than the colonists of the fate of Hope, but they saw how grief had stricken him down, and in their true hearts they felt a human compassion which might well have been emulated by those of his own kind, but was not.
The young man was convinced in his more serene moments that Hope had fallen a victim to the snares of Acashee, or the Spider. He recalled her words, “You had a friend; you have a foe,” and he felt the secret of her fate was known fully to the Terrentines. Moody and taciturn, he wandered along the sea-shore, traversed the pathless woods, and watched the setting stars from solitary mountain hights. Sometimes he would appear in the Vines mansion, where he would for hours stealthily scan the faces of its inmates, and then depart with a groan.
“Gone, gone, and not a face is left to look like little Hope!”
At length the great Hall of Sir Richard Vines was closed forever, and the owner abandoned a colony which had become endeared to him by so many labors and sorrows, and which to him still bore the phantom presence of little Hope. He removed his household gods to the island of Barbadoes, with which he had hitherto associated himself in commercial transactions.