Twice-Told Tales (10 page)

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 Catholic Inquisition before she felt the lash and lay in the
dungeons of the Puritans. Her mission had extended also to the
followers of the Prophet, and from them she had received the courtesy
and kindness which all the contending sects of our purer religion
united to deny her. Her husband and herself had resided many months in
Turkey, where even the sultan's countenance was gracious to them; in
that pagan land, too, was Ilbrahim's birthplace, and his Oriental name
was a mark of gratitude for the good deeds of an unbeliever.

When Pearson and his wife had thus acquired all the rights over
Ilbrahim that could be delegated, their affection for him became, like
the memory of their native land or their mild sorrow for the dead, a
piece of the immovable furniture of their hearts. The boy, also, after
a week or two of mental disquiet, began to gratify his protectors by
many inadvertent proofs that he considered them as parents and their
house as home. Before the winter snows were melted the persecuted
infant, the little wanderer from a remote and heathen country, seemed
native in the New England cottage and inseparable from the warmth and
security of its hearth. Under the influence of kind treatment, and in
the consciousness that he was loved, Ilbrahim's demeanor lost a
premature manliness which had resulted from his earlier situation; he
became more childlike and his natural character displayed itself with
freedom. It was in many respects a beautiful one, yet the disordered
imaginations of both his father and mother had perhaps propagated a
certain unhealthiness in the mind of the boy. In his general state
Ilbrahim would derive enjoyment from the most trifling events and from
every object about him; he seemed to discover rich treasures of
happiness by a faculty analogous to that of the witch-hazel, which
points to hidden gold where all is barren to the eye. His airy gayety,
coming to him from a thousand sources, communicated itself to the
family, and Ilbrahim was like a domesticated sunbeam, brightening
moody countenances and chasing away the gloom from the dark corners of
the cottage.

On the other hand, as the susceptibility of pleasure is also that of
pain, the exuberant cheerfulness of the boy's prevailing temper
sometimes yielded to moments of deep depression. His sorrows could not
always be followed up to their original source, but most frequently
they appeared to flow—though Ilbrahim was young to be sad for such a
cause—from wounded love. The flightiness of his mirth rendered him
often guilty of offences against the decorum of a Puritan household,
and on these occasions he did not invariably escape rebuke. But the
slightest word of real bitterness, which he was infallible in
distinguishing from pretended anger, seemed to sink into his heart and
poison all his enjoyments till he became sensible that he was entirely
forgiven. Of the malice which generally accompanies a superfluity of
sensitiveness Ilbrahim was altogether destitute. When trodden upon, he
would not turn; when wounded, he could but die. His mind was wanting
in the stamina of self-support. It was a plant that would twine
beautifully round something stronger than itself; but if repulsed or
torn away, it had no choice but to wither on the ground. Dorothy's
acuteness taught her that severity would crush the spirit of the
child, and she nurtured him with the gentle care of one who handles a
butterfly. Her husband manifested an equal affection, although it grew
daily less productive of familiar caresses.

The feelings of the neighboring people in regard to the Quaker infant
and his protectors had not undergone a favorable change, in spite of
the momentary triumph which the desolate mother had obtained over
their sympathies. The scorn and bitterness of which he was the object
were very grievous to Ilbrahim, especially when any circumstance made
him sensible that the children his equals in age partook of the enmity
of their parents. His tender and social nature had already overflowed
in attachments to everything about him, and still there was a residue
of unappropriated love which he yearned to bestow upon the little ones
who were taught to hate him. As the warm days of spring came on
Ilbrahim was accustomed to remain for hours silent and inactive within
hearing of the children's voices at their play, yet with his usual
delicacy of feeling he avoided their notice, and would flee and hide
himself from the smallest individual among them. Chance, however, at
length seemed to open a medium of communication between his heart and
theirs; it was by means of a boy about two years older than Ilbrahim,
who was injured by a fall from a tree in the vicinity of Pearson's
habitation. As the sufferer's own home was at some distance, Dorothy
willingly received him under her roof and became his tender and
careful nurse.