——How does it happen I say, that of all the accusers they and they alone have escaped the mark of the teeth? How! ... because they alone speak the truth; because they are the deceived ... we know not how, judges, but in a fearful way. They are deceived ... poor children, but they do not seek to deceive others. Nor do they lie in wait for a——
He was interrupted by a loud furious neigh, so loud and so furious from the great black stallion at the door, that Martha awoke and started up with a scream that thrilled the very blood of the judges, and made the people hurry away from the bar.
Burroughs now saw that he had no hope, and that in a moment the poor soul before him would bear the sentence of death. He caught up his iron-shod staff, and breaking through the crowd which recoiled from his path as if he were something whose touch would be fatal to life, sprang upon the back of the horse, and gallopped away toward the sea-shore.
No language on earth, no power on earth can describe the scene that followed his departure, the confusion, the outcry, the terror of the people who saw the fire fly from his rocky path, and heard leap after leap of the charger bounding toward the precipice; nor the fright of the judges; nor the pitiable distress and perplexity of the poor childish woman, when she was made fully to understand, after the tumult was over and the dread clamor and fire-flashing had passed away, and everything was quiet as the grave—nothing to be heard but a heavy trample afar off and the dull roar of the sea—that she must be prepared for death.
She could not believe it ... she would not believe it—she did not ... such was her perfect simplicity, till the chief judge came to her and assured her with tears in his eyes, over and over again, that it must be so.
Ah me! said poor Martha, looking out toward the quarter of the sky where the horseman had so hastily disappeared, and where she had seen the last of the fire-light struck from his path; Ah me, bending her head to listen, and holding up her finger as if she could hear him on his way back. Ah me!—ah me ... and that was all she said in reply to her judges, and all she said when they drove her up to the place of her death, decked out in all her tattered finery, as if it were not so much for the grave, as for a bridal that she was prepared.
Ah me! said poor Martha when they put the rope about her neck.... Ah me!—and she died while she was playing with her little withered fingers, and blowing the loose grey hair from about her mouth as it strayed away from her tawdry cap ... saying over the words of a child in the voice of a child, Ah me—ah me—with her last breath—
God forgive her judges!
CHAPTER XII.
The work of that day was the death of George Burroughs. The unhappy allusion that he made to the knife, just before he stopped so suddenly and fixed his eyes upon a young female who sat near him with her back to the light, and her face muffled up so that nobody knew her till after she had gone away, was now in every body’s mouth. She was the sister of Rachel Dyer, and her name was Mary Elizabeth; after Mary Dyer and Elizabeth Hutchinson. It was now concluded that what he knew of the perjury of the witnesses, of the sheet and of the knife, he had been told by Mary Elizabeth or by Rachel Dyer, who had been watching him all the livelong day, from a part of the house, where the shadow of a mighty tree fell so as to darken all the faces about her.