“I behold a band of warriors—brave as the bravest. I hear the cry of derision—the vaunt of the warrior. Slowly the mist is ascending—I see the hand of a woman, and before it fly the brave men, a thousand pale specters trooping to the spirit-land!”
With a deep sigh she turned her eyes downward, placed her hand upon the head of a pet panther, which crouched at her feet, and slowly moved away under the gorgeous canopy of overhanging pearl and amethyst, and disappeared in the distance.
The Indians listened aghast, and watched her receding figure till it disappeared. They coupled her prediction with the ambiguous words of the priest, and they became filled with doubt and dismay.
In the long years of her imprisonment, ignorant of the place of her seclusion, conscious only that its distance must be great from all that she had known or loved, for she had traveled days and even weeks before her captors reached the falls, she had despaired of ever again beholding a white human face. She had been taken while sleeping under the bed of the river, and placed as we find her, like some ancient priestess, alone in this vast temple, to await divine oracles.
To the eye of the Indian she had been passive; she had awed him by her calm self-reliance; she had held him in subjection by a power allied to prophecy, which came upon her, how and when she knew not. She spoke, and they listened with profound awe; she commanded and they obeyed.
Once, a chief had told her of the departure of her father and all the household from the colony, but the name of John Bonyton had not sounded upon her ears in all this weary time, till it was pronounced by Acashee. At that sound, years were annihilated, the torpor of time vanished, and Hope Vines trembled with the newly-awakened emotions of her early days.
With that audacious activity which marked the action of her childhood, Hope had practiced one feat totally unknown to her captors. She had watched the advent of visitors to the cave, and found they always appeared at one particular side of the water, and that without much apparent effort. Following up this suggestion, she had dared the attempt, and found it achieved with little difficulty. Often, when her captors were buried in sleep, Hope darted below the jutting waters, and landed upon a smooth rock at the river-brink.
She was a child of bright and varied fancies, and to her mind, the wild magnificence that met her eye was a full reward for the danger she incurred. The gorgeous beauty of the grotto, also, afforded her exhaustless emotions of delight, and believing herself forever debarred from all companionship with her own people, she yielded to the romance which surrounded her with something more than content.
She recalled the story of her kinsman, Sir Walter Raleigh, with whose melancholy history she felt herself allied, and believed this imprisonment of hers was a part of that mysterious link which always had woven her destiny with his, and she unconsciously resigned herself to the position for which she had been destined by her captors. By them she had been abducted, because they believed in her supernatural gifts, and Acashee had lent herself to the plan that she might sever her forever from the companionship of John Bonyton.
Acashee had been compelled to avoid the Pool ever after the abduction of Hope. She could resign the man whom she had learned to love with a wild infatuation, conscious that he had never returned her love, but she could not resign him to a rival. Blighted in her own hope, revenge took the place of the gentler emotion, and the Indian woman felt a strange delight in contemplating in her own mind the misery she had occasioned in another.