Twice-told tales
character of her speech was changed; her images became distinct though
wild, and her denunciations had an almost hellish bitterness.
“The governor and his mighty men,” she said, “have gathered together,
taking counsel among themselves and saying, ‘What shall we do unto this
people—even unto the people that have come into this land to put our
iniquity to the blush?’ And, lo! the devil entereth into the
council-chamber like a lame man of low stature and gravely apparelled,
with a dark and twisted countenance and a bright, downcast eye. And he
standeth up among the rulers; yea, he goeth to and fro, whispering to
each; and every man lends his ear, for his word is ‘Slay! Slay!rsquo;
But I say unto ye, Woe to them that slay! Woe to them that shed the
blood of saints! Woe to them that have slain the husband and cast forth
the child, the tender infant, to wander homeless and hungry and cold
till he die, and have saved the mother alive in the cruelty of their
tender mercies! Woe to them in their lifetime! Cursed are they in the
delight and pleasure of their hearts! Woe to them in their death-hour,
whether it come swiftly with blood and violence or after long and
lingering pain! Woe in the dark house, in the rottenness of the grave,
when the children’s children shall revile the ashes of the fathers!
Woe, woe, woe, at the judgment, when all the persecuted and all the
slain in this bloody land, and the father, the mother and the child,
shall await them in a day that they cannot escape! Seed of the faith,
seed of the faith, ye whose hearts are moving with a power that ye know
not, arise, wash your hands of this innocent blood! Lift your voices,
chosen ones, cry aloud, and call down a woe and a judgment with me!”
Having thus given vent to the flood of malignity which she mistook for
inspiration, the speaker was silent. Her voice was succeeded by the
hysteric shrieks of several women, but the feelings of the audience
generally had not been drawn onward in the current with her own. They
remained stupefied, stranded, as it were, in the midst of a torrent
which deafened them by its roaring, but might not move them by its
violence. The clergyman, who could not hitherto have ejected the
usurper of his pulpit otherwise than by bodily force, now addressed her
in the tone of just indignation and legitimate authority.
“Get you down, woman, from the holy place which you profane,” he said,
“Is it to the Lord’s house that you come to pour forth the foulness of
your heart and the inspiration of the devil? Get you down, and remember
that the sentence of death is on you—yea, and shall be executed, were
it but for this day’s work.”
“I go, friend, I go, for the voice hath had its utterance,” replied
she, in a depressed, and even mild, tone. “I have done my mission unto
thee and to thy people; reward me with stripes, imprisonment or death,
as ye shall be permitted.” The weakness of exhausted passion caused her
steps to totter as she descended the pulpit stairs.
The people, in the mean while, were stirring to and fro on the floor of
the house, whispering among themselves and glancing toward the
intruder. Many of them now recognized her as the woman who had
assaulted the governor with frightful language as he passed by the
window of her prison; they knew, also, that she was adjudged to suffer
death, and had been preserved only by an involuntary banishment into
the wilderness. The new outrage by which she had provoked her fate
seemed to render further lenity impossible, and a gentleman in military
dress, with a stout man of inferior rank, drew toward the door of the
meetinghouse and awaited her approach. Scarcely did her feet press the
floor, however, when an unexpected scene occurred. In that moment of
her peril, when every eye frowned with death, a little timid boy threw
his arms round his mother.
“I am here, mother; it is I, and I will go with thee to prison,” he
exclaimed.
She gazed at him with a doubtful and almost frightened expression, for
she knew that the boy had been cast out to perish, and she had not
hoped to see his face again. She feared, perhaps, that it was but one
of the happy visions with which her excited fancy had often deceived
her in the solitude of the desert or in prison; but when she felt his
hand warm within her own and heard his little eloquence of childish
love, she began to know that she was yet a mother.
“Blessed art thou, my son!” she sobbed. “My heart was withered—yea,
dead with thee and with thy father—and now it leaps as in the first
moment when I pressed thee to my bosom.”
She knelt down and embraced him again and again, while the joy that
could find no words expressed itself in broken accents, like the
bubbles gushing up to vanish at the surface of a deep fountain. The
sorrows of past years and the darker peril that was nigh cast not a
shadow on the brightness of that fleeting moment. Soon, however, the
spectators saw a change upon her face as the consciousness of her sad
estate returned, and grief supplied the fount of tears which joy had
opened. By the words she uttered it would seem that the indulgence of
natural love had given her mind a momentary sense of its errors, and
made her know how far she had strayed from duty in following the
dictates of a wild fanaticism.
“In a doleful hour art thou returned to me, poor boy,” she said, “for
thy mother’s path has gone darkening onward, till now the end is death.
Son, son, I have borne thee in my arms when my limbs were tottering,
and I have fed thee with the food that I was fainting for; yet I have
ill-performed a mother’s part by thee in life, and now I leave thee no
inheritance but woe and shame. Thou wilt go seeking through the world,
and find all hearts closed against thee and their sweet affections
turned to bitterness for my sake. My child, my child, how many a pang
awaits thy gentle spirit, and I the cause of all!”
She hid her face on Ilbrahim’s head, and her long raven hair,
discolored with the ashes of her mourning, fell down about him like a
veil. A low and interrupted moan was the voice of her heart’s anguish,
and it did not fail to move the sympathies of many who mistook their
involuntary virtue for a sin. Sobs were audible in the female section
of the house, and every man who was a father drew his hand across his
eyes.
Tobias Pearson was agitated and uneasy, but a certain feeling like the
consciousness of guilt oppressed him; so that he could not go forth and
offer himself as the protector of the child. Dorothy, however, had
watched her husband’s eye. Her mind was free from the influence that
had begun to work on his, and she drew near the Quaker woman and
addressed her in the hearing of all the congregation.
“Stranger, trust this boy to me, and I will be his mother,” she said,
taking Ilbrahim’s hand. “Providence has signally marked out my husband
to protect him, and he has fed at our table and lodged under our roof
now many days, till our hearts have grown very strongly unto him. Leave
the tender child with us, and be at ease concerning his welfare.”
The Quaker rose from the ground, but drew the boy closer to her, while
she gazed earnestly in Dorothy’s face. Her mild but saddened features
and neat matronly attire harmonized together and were like a verse of
fireside poetry. Her very aspect proved that she was blameless, so far
as mortal could be so, in respect to God and man, while the enthusiast,
in her robe of sackcloth and girdle of knotted cord, had as evidently
violated the duties of the present life and the future by fixing her
attention wholly on the latter. The two females, as they held each a
hand of Ilbrahim, formed a practical allegory: it was rational piety
and unbridled fanaticism contending for the empire of a young heart.
“Thou art not of our people,” said the Quaker, mournfully.
“No, we are not of your people,” replied Dorothy, with mildness, “but
we are Christians looking upward to the same heaven with you. Doubt not
that your boy shall meet you there, if there be a blessing on our
tender and prayerful guidance of him. Thither, I trust, my own children
have gone before me, for I also have been a mother. I am no longer so,”
she added, in a faltering tone, “and your son will have all my care.”
“But will ye lead him in the path which his parents have trodden?”
demanded the Quaker. “Can ye teach him the enlightened faith which his
father has died for, and for which I—even I—am soon to become an
unworthy martyr? The boy has been baptized in blood; will ye keep the
mark fresh and ruddy upon his forehead?”
“I will not deceive you,” answered Dorothy. “If your child become our
child, we must breed him up in the instruction which Heaven has
imparted to us; we must pray for him the prayers of our own faith; we
must do toward him according to the dictates of our own consciences,
and not of yours. Were we to act otherwise, we should abuse your trust,
even in complying with your wishes.”
The mother looked down upon her boy with a troubled countenance, and
then turned her eyes upward to heaven. She seemed to pray internally,
and the contention of her soul was evident.
“Friend,” she said, at length, to Dorothy, “I doubt not that my son
shall receive all earthly tenderness at thy hands. Nay, I will believe
that even thy imperfect lights may guide him to a better world, for
surely thou art on the path thither. But thou hast spoken of a husband.
Doth he stand here among this multitude of people? Let him come forth,
for I must know to whom I commit this most precious trust.”
She turned her face upon the male auditors, and after a momentary delay
Tobias Pearson came forth from among them. The Quaker saw the dress
which marked his military rank, and shook her head; but then she noted
the hesitating air, the eyes that struggled with her own and were
vanquished, the color that went and came and could find no
resting-place. As she gazed an unmirthful smile spread over her
features, like sunshine that grows melancholy in some desolate spot.
Her lips moved inaudibly, but at length she spake:
“I hear it, I hear it! The voice speaketh within me and saith, ‘Leave
thy child, Catharine, for his place is here, and go hence, for I have
other work for thee. Break the bonds of natural affection, martyr thy
love, and know that in all these things eternal wisdom hath its ends.’
I go, friends, I go. Take ye my boy, my precious jewel. I go hence
trusting that all shall be well, and that even for his infant hands
there is a labor in the vineyard.”
She knelt down and whispered to Ilbrahim, who at first struggled and
clung to his mother with sobs and tears, but remained passive when she
had kissed his cheek and arisen from the ground. Having held her hands
over his head in mental prayer, she was ready to depart.
“Farewell, friends in mine extremity,” she said to Pearson and his
wife; “the good deed ye have done me is a treasure laid up in heaven,
to be returned a thousandfold hereafter.—And farewell, ye mine enemies,
to whom it is not permitted to harm so much as a hair of my head, nor
to stay my footsteps even for a moment. The day is coming when ye shall
call upon me to witness for ye to this one sin uncommitted, and I will
rise up and answer.”
She turned her steps toward the door, and the men who had stationed
themselves to guard it withdrew and suffered her to pass. A general
sentiment of pity overcame the virulence of religious hatred.
Sanctified by her love and her affliction, she went forth, and all the
people gazed after her till she had journeyed up the hill and was lost
behind its brow. She went, the apostle of her own unquiet heart, to
renew the wanderings of past years. For her voice had been already
heard in many lands of Christendom, and she had pined in the cells of a