Chapter I: Part 1

Text size

[Page 38
“‘DAVID!’ SHE CALLED. ‘DAVID! DAVID! DAVID!’”]

SILENCE

_AND OTHER STORIES_

_By_ MARY E. WILKINS
_Author of “Jerome, A Poor
Man” “Madelon” “Jane Field”_

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PAGE

+Silence+ 1

+The Buckley Lady+ 55

+Evelina’s Garden+ 111

+A New England Prophet+ 184

+The Little Maid at the Door+ 225

+Lydia Hersey, of East Bridgewater+ 255

ILLUSTRATIONS

“‘DAVID!’ SHE CALLED. ‘DAVID! DAVID!
DAVID!’” _Frontispiece_
AT ENSIGN SHELDON’S HOUSE THE MORNING
AFTER THE MASSACRE _Facing p._ 30
“SHE HEARD RAPID FOOTSTEPS” ” 132
“‘THE LORD MAKE ME WORTHY OF THEE,
EVELINA!’” ” 180

SILENCE

At dusk Silence went down the Deerfield street to Ensign John Sheldon’s house. She wore her red blanket over her head, pinned closely under her chin, and her white profile showed whiter between the scarlet folds. She had been spinning all day, and shreds of wool still clung to her indigo petticoat; now and then one floated off on the north wind. It was bitter cold, and the snow was four feet deep. Silence’s breath went before her in a cloud; the snow creaked under her feet. All over the village the crust was so firm that men could walk upon it. The houses were half sunken in sharp, rigid drifts of snow; their roofs were laden with it; icicles hung from the eaves. All the elms were white with snow frozen to them so strongly that it was not shaken off when they were lashed by the fierce wind.

There was an odor of boiling meal in the air; the housewives were preparing supper. Silence had eaten hers; she and her aunt, Widow Eunice Bishop, supped early. She had not far to go to Ensign Sheldon’s. She was nearly there when she heard quick footsteps on the creaking snow behind her. Her heart beat quickly, but she did not look around. “Silence,” said a voice. Then she paused, and waited, with her eyes cast down and her mouth grave, until David Walcott reached her. “What do you out this cold night, sweetheart?” he said.

“I am going down to Goodwife Sheldon’s,” replied Silence. Then suddenly she cried out, wildly: “Oh, David, what is that on your cloak? What is it?”

David looked curiously at his cloak. “I see naught on my cloak save old weather stains,” said he. “What mean you, Silence?”

Silence quieted down suddenly. “It is gone now,” said she, in a subdued voice.

“What did you see, Silence?”

Silence turned towards him; her face quivered convulsively. “I saw a blotch of blood,” she cried. “I have been seeing them everywhere all day. I have seen them on the snow as I came along.”

David Walcott looked down at her in a bewildered way. He carried his musket over his shoulder, and was shrugged up in his cloak; his heavy, flaxen mustache was stiff and white with frost. He had just been relieved from his post as sentry, and it was no child’s play to patrol Deerfield village on a day like that, nor had it been for many previous days. The weather had been so severe that even the French and Indians, lurking like hungry wolves in the neighborhood, had hesitated to descend upon the town, and had stayed in camp.

“What mean you, Silence?” he said.

“What I say,” returned Silence, in a strained voice. “I have seen blotches of blood everywhere all day. The enemy will be upon us.”

David laughed loudly, and Silence caught his arm. “Don’t laugh so loud,” she whispered. Then David laughed again. “You be all overwrought, sweetheart,” said he. “I have kept guard all the afternoon by the northern palisades, and I have seen not so much as a red fox on the meadow. I tell thee the French and Indians have gone back to Canada. There is no more need of fear.”

“I have started all day and all last night at the sound of warwhoops,” said Silence.

“Thy head is nigh turned with these troublous times, poor lass. We must cross the road now to Ensign Sheldon’s house. Come quickly, or you will perish in this cold.”

“Nay, my head is not turned,” said Silence, as they hurried on over the crust; “the enemy be hiding in the forests beyond the meadows. David, they be not gone.”

“And I tell thee they be gone, sweetheart. Think you not we should have seen their camp smoke had they been there? And we have had trusty scouts out. Come in, and my aunt, Hannah Sheldon, shall talk thee out of this folly.”

The front windows of John Sheldon’s house were all flickering red from the hearth fire. David flung open the door, and they entered. There was such a goodly blaze from the great logs in the wide fireplace that even the shadows in the remote corners of the large keeping-room were dusky red, and the faces of all the people in the room had a clear red glow upon them.

Goodwife Hannah Sheldon stood before the fire, stirring some porridge in a great pot that hung on the crane; some fair-haired children sat around a basket shelling corn, a slight young girl in a snuff-yellow gown was spinning, and an old woman in a quilted hood crouched in a corner of the fireplace, holding out her lean hands to the heat.

Goodwife Sheldon turned around when the door opened. “Good-day, Mistress Silence Hoit,” she called out, and her voice was sweet, but deep like a man’s. “Draw near to the fire, for in truth you must be near perishing with the cold.”

“There’ll be fire enough ere morning, I trow, to warm the whole township,” said the old woman in the corner. Her small black eyes gleamed sharply out of the gloom of her great hood; her yellow face was all drawn and puckered towards the centre of her shrewdly leering mouth.

“Now you hush your croaking, Goody Crane,” cried Hannah Sheldon. “Draw the stool near to the fire for Silence, David. I cannot stop stirring, or the porridge will burn. How fares your aunt this cold weather, Silence?”

“Well, except for her rheumatism,” replied Silence. She sat down on the stool that David placed for her, and slipped her blanket back from her head. Her beautiful face, full of a grave and delicate stateliness, drooped towards the fire, her smooth fair hair was folded in clear curves like the leaves of a lily around her ears, and she wore a high, transparent, tortoise-shell comb like a coronet in the knot at the back of her head.

David Walcott had pulled off his cap and cloak, and stood looking down at her. “Silence is all overwrought by this talk of Indians,” he remarked, presently, and a blush came over his weather-beaten blond face at the tenderness in his own tone.

“The Indians have gone back to Canada,” said Goodwife Sheldon, in a magisterial voice. She stirred the porridge faster; it was steaming fiercely.

“So I tell her,” said David.

Silence looked up in Hannah Sheldon’s sober, masterly face. “Goodwife, may I have a word in private with you?” she asked, in a half-whisper.

“As soon as I take the porridge off,” replied Goodwife Sheldon.

“God grant it be not the last time she takes the porridge off!” said the old woman.

Hannah Sheldon laughed. “Here be Goody Crane in a sorry mind to-night,” said she. “Wait till she have a sup of this good porridge, and I trow she’ll pack off the Indians to Canada in a half-hour!”

Hannah began dipping out the porridge. When she had placed generous dishes of it on the table and bidden everybody draw up, she motioned to Silence. “Now, Mistress Silence,” said she, “come into the bedroom if you would have a word with me.”

Silence followed her into the little north room opening out of the keeping-room, where Ensign John Sheldon and his wife Hannah had slept for many years. It was icy cold, and the thick fur of frost on the little window-panes sent out sparkles in the candle-light. The two women stood beside the great chintz draped and canopied bed, Hannah holding the flaring candle. “Now, what is it?” said she.

“Oh, Goodwife Sheldon!” said Silence. Her face remained quite still, but it was as if one could see her soul fluttering beneath it.

“You be all overwrought, as David saith,” cried Goodwife Sheldon, and her voice had a motherly harshness in it. Silence had no mother, and her lover, David Walcott, had none. Hannah was his aunt, and loved him like her son, so she felt towards Silence as towards her son’s betrothed.

“In truth I know not what it is,” said Silence, in a kind of reserved terror, “but there has been all day a great heaviness of spirit upon me, and last night I dreamed. All day I have fancied I saw blood here and there. Sometimes, when I have looked out of the window, the whole snow hath suddenly glared with red. Goodwife Sheldon, think you the Indians and the French have in truth gone back to Canada?”

Goodwife Sheldon hesitated a moment, then she spoke up cheerily. “In truth have they!” cried she. “John said but this noon that naught of them had been seen for some time.”

“So David said,” returned Silence; “but this heaviness will not be driven away. You know how Parson Williams hath spoken in warning in the pulpit and elsewhere, and besought us to be vigilant. He holdeth that the savages be not gone.”

Hannah Sheldon smiled. “Parson Williams is a godly man, but prone ever to look upon the dark side,” said she.

“If the Indians should come to-night--” said Silence.

“I tell ye they will not come, child. I shall lay me down in that bed a-trusting in the Lord, and having no fear against the time I shall arise from it.”

“If the Indians should come-- Goodwife Sheldon, be not angered; hear me. If they should come, I pray you keep David here to defend you in this house, and let him not out to seek me. You know well that our house is musket-proof as well as this, and it has long been agreed that they who live nearest, whose houses have not thick walls, shall come to ours and help us make defence. I pray you let not David out of the house to seek me, should there be a surprise to-night. I pray you give me your promise for this, Goodwife Sheldon.”

Hannah Sheldon laughed. “In truth will I give thee the promise, if it makes thee easier, child,” said she. “At the very first war-screech will I tie David in the chimney-corner with my apron-string, unless you lend me yours. But there will be no war-screech to-night, nor to-morrow night, nor the night after that. The Lord will preserve His people that trust in Him. To-day have I set a web of linen in the loom, and I have candles ready to dip to-morrow, and the day after that I have a quilting. I look not for Indians. If they come I will set them to work. Fear not for David, sweetheart. In truth you should have a bolder heart, an’ you look to be a soldier’s wife some day.”

“I would I had never been aught to him, that he might not be put in jeopardy to defend me!” said Silence, and her words seemed visible in a white cloud at her mouth.

“We must not stay here in the cold,” said Goodwife Sheldon. “Out with ye, Silence, and have a sup of hot porridge, and then David shall see ye home.”

Silence sipped a cup of the hot porridge obediently, then she pinned her red blanket over her head. Hannah Sheldon assisted her, bringing it warmly over her face. “’Tis bitter cold,” she said. “Now have no more fear, Mistress Silence; the Indians will not come to-night; but do you come over to-morrow, and keep me company while I dip the candles.”

“There’ll be company enough--there’ll be a whole houseful,” muttered the old woman in the corner; but nobody heeded her. She was a lonely and wretched old creature whom people sheltered from pity, although she was somewhat feared and held in ill repute. There were rumors that she was well versed in all the dark lore of witchcraft, and held commerce with unlawful beings. The children of Deerfield village looked askance at her, and clung to their mothers if they met her on the street, for they whispered among themselves that old Goody Crane rode through the air on a broom in the night-time.

Silence and David passed out into the keen night. “If you meet my good-man, hasten him home, for the porridge is cooling,” Hannah Sheldon called after them.

They met not a soul on Deerfield street, and parted at Silence’s door. David would have entered had she bidden him, but she said peremptorily that she had a hard task of spinning that evening, and then she wished him good-night, and without a kiss, for Silence Hoit was chary of caresses. But to-night she called him back ere he was fairly in the street. “David,” she called, and he ran back.

“What is it, Silence?” he asked.

She put back her blanket, threw her arms around his neck, and clung to him trembling.

“Why, sweetheart,” he whispered, “what has come over thee?”

“You know--this house is made like--a fort,” she said, bringing out her words in gasps, “and--there are muskets, and--powder stored in it, and--Captain Moulton, and his sons, and--John Carson will come, and make--a stand in it. I have--no fear should--the Indians come. Remember that I have no fear, and shall be safe here, David.”

David laughed, and patted her clinging shoulders. “Yes, I will remember, Silence,” he said; “but the Indians will not come.”

“Remember that I am safe here, and have no fear,” she repeated. Then she kissed him of her own accord, as if she had been his wife, and entered the house, and he went away, wondering.

Silence’s aunt, Widow Eunice Bishop, did not look up when the door opened; she was knitting by the fire, sitting erect with her mouth pursed. She had a hostile expression, as if she were listening to some opposite argument. Silence hung her blanket on a peg; she stood irresolute a minute, then she breathed on the frosty window and cleared a space through which she could look out. Her aunt gave a quick, fierce glance at her, then she tossed back her head and knitted. Silence stood staring out of the little peep-hole in the frosty pane. Her aunt glanced at her again, then she spoke.

“I should think if you had been out gossiping and gadding for two hours, you had better get yourself at some work now,” she said, “unless your heart be set on idling. A pretty house-wife you’ll make!”

“Come here quick, quick!” Silence cried out.

Her aunt started, but she would not get up; she knitted, scowling. “I cannot afford to idle if other folk can,” said she. “I have no desire to keep running to windows and standing there gaping, as you have done all this day.”

“Oh, aunt, I pray you to come,” said Silence, and she turned her white face over her shoulder towards her aunt; “there is somewhat wrong surely.”

Widow Bishop got up, still scowling, and went over to the window. Silence stood aside and pointed to the little clear circle in the midst of the frost. “Over there to the north,” she said, in a quick, low voice.

Her aunt adjusted her horn spectacles and bent her head stiffly. “I see naught,” said she.

“A red glare in the north!”

“A red glare in the north! Be ye out of your mind, wench! There be no red glare in the north. Everything be quiet in the town. Get ye away from the window and to your work. I have no more patience with such doings. Here have I left my knitting for nothing, and I just about setting the heel. You’d best keep to your spinning instead of spying out of the window at your own nightmares, and gadding about the town after David Walcott. Pretty doings for a modest maid, I call it, following after young men in this fashion!”

Silence turned on her aunt, and her blue eyes gleamed dark; she held up her head like a queen. “I follow not after young men,” she said.

“Heard I not David Walcott’s voice at the door? Went you not to Goodwife Sheldon’s, where he lives? Was it not his voice--hey?”

“Yes, ’twas, an’ I had a right to go there an I chose, an’ ’twas naught unmaidenly,” said Silence.

“’Twas unmaidenly in my day,” retorted her aunt; “perhaps ’tis different now.” She had returned to her seat, and was clashing her knitting-needles like two swords in a duel.

Silence pulled a spinning-wheel before the fire and fell to work. The wheel turned so rapidly that the spokes were a revolving shadow; there was a sound as if a bee had entered the room.

“I stayed at home, and your uncle did the courting,” Widow Eunice Bishop continued, in a voice that demanded response.

But Silence made none. She went on spinning. Her aunt eyed her maliciously. “I never went after nightfall to his house that he might see me home,” said she. “I trow my mother would have locked me up in the garret, and kept me on meal and water for a week, had I done aught so bold.”

Silence spun on. Her aunt threw her head back, and knitted, jerking out her elbows. Neither of them spoke again until the clock struck nine. Then Widow Bishop wound her ball of yarn closer, and stuck in the knitting-needles, and rose. “’Tis time to put out the candle,” she said, “and _I_ have done a good day’s work, and feel need of rest. They that have idled cannot make it up by wasting tallow.” She threw open the door that led to her bedroom, and a blast of icy confined air rushed in. She untied the black cap that framed her nervous face austerely, and her gray head, with its tight rosette of hair on the crown, appeared. Silence set her spinning-wheel back, and raked the ashes over the hearth fire. Then she took the candle and climbed the stairs to her own chamber. Her aunt was already in bed, her pale, white-frilled face sunk in the icy feather pillow; but she did not bid her good-night: not on account of her anger; there was seldom any such formal courtesy exchanged between the women. Silence’s chamber had one side sloping with the slope of the roof, and in it were two dormer-windows looking towards the north. She set her candle on the table, breathed on one of these windows, as she had on the one down-stairs, and looked out. She stood there several minutes, then she turned away, shaking her head. The room was very cold. She let down her smooth fair hair, and her fingers began to redden; she took off her kerchief; then she stopped, and looked hesitatingly at her bed, with its blue curtains. She set her mouth hard, and put on her kerchief. Then she sat down on the edge of her bed and waited. After a while she pulled a quilt from the bed and wrapped it around her. Still she did not shiver. She had blown out the candle, and the room was very dark. All her nerves seemed screwed tight like fiddle-strings, and her thoughts beat upon them and made terrific waves of sound in her ears. She saw sparks and flashes like diamond fire in the darkness. She had her hands clinched tight, but she did not feel her hands nor her feet--she did not feel her whole body. She sat so until two o’clock in the morning. When the clock down in the keeping-room struck the hours, the peals shocked her back for a minute to her old sense of herself; then she lost it again. Just after the clock struck two, while the silvery reverberation of the bell tone was still in her ears, and she was breathing a little freer, a great rosy glow suffused the frosty windows. A horrible discord of sound arose without. Above everything else came something like a peal of laughter from wild beasts or fiends.

Silence arose and went down-stairs. Her aunt rushed out of her bedroom, shrieking, and caught hold of her. “Oh, Silence, what is it, what is it?” she cried.

“Get away till I light a candle,” said Silence. She fairly pushed her aunt off, shovelled the ashes from the coals in the fireplace, and lighted a candle. Then she threw some wood on the smouldering fire. Her aunt was running around the room screaming. There came a great pound on the door.

“It’s the Indians! it’s the Indians! don’t let ’em in!” shrieked her aunt. “Don’t let them in! don’t let them!” She placed her lean shoulder in her white bed-gown against the door. “Go away! go away!” she yelled. “You can’t come in! O Lord Almighty, save us!”

“You stand off,” said Silence. She took hold of her aunt’s shoulders. “Be quiet,” she commanded. Then she called out, in a firm voice, “Who is there?”

At the shout in response she drew the great iron bolts quickly and flung open the heavy nail-studded door. There was a press of frantic, white-faced people into the room; then the door was slammed to and the bolts shot. It was very still in the room, except for the shuffling rush of the men’s feet, and now and then a stern, gasping order. The children did not cry; all the noise was without. The house might have stood in the midst of some awful wilderness peopled with fiendish beasts, from the noise without. The cries seemed actually in the room. The children’s eyes glared white over their mothers’ shoulders.

The men hurriedly strengthened the window-shutters with props of logs, and fitted the muskets into the loop-holes. Suddenly there was a great crash at the door, and a wilder yell outside. The muskets opened fire, and some of the women rushed to the door and pressed fiercely against it with their delicate shoulders, their white, desperate faces turning back dumbly, like a spiritual phalanx of defence. Silence and her aunt were among them.

Suddenly Widow Eunice Bishop, at a fresh onslaught upon the door, and a fiercer yell, lifted up her voice and shrieked back in a rage as mad as theirs. Her speech, too, was almost inarticulate, and the sense of it lost in a savage frenzy; her tongue stuttered over abusive epithets; but for a second she prevailed over the terrible chorus without. It was like the solo of a fury. Then louder yells drowned her out; the muskets cracked faster; the men rammed in the charges; the savages fell back somewhat; the blows on the door ceased.

Silence ran up the stairs to her chamber, and peeped cautiously out of a little dormer-window. Deerfield village was roaring with flames, the sky and snow were red, and leaping through the glare came the painted savages, a savage white face and the waving sword of a French officer in their midst. The awful warwhoops and the death-cries of her friends and neighbors sounded in her ears. She saw, close under her window, the dark sweep of the tomahawk, the quick glance of the scalping-knife, and the red starting of caps of blood. She saw infants dashed through the air, and the backward-straining forms of shrieking women dragged down the street; but she saw not David Walcott anywhere.

She eyed in an agony some dark bodies lying like logs in the snow. A wild impulse seized her to run out, turn their dead faces, and see that none of them was her lover’s. Her room was full of red light; everything in it showed distinctly. The roof of the next house crashed in, and the sparks and cinders shot up like a volcano. There was a great outcry of terror from below, and Silence hurried down. The Indians were trying to fire the house from the west side. They had piled a bank of brush against it, and the men had hacked new loop-holes and were beating them back.

John Carson’s wife clutched Silence as she entered the keeping-room. “They are trying to set the house on fire,” she gasped, “and--the bullets are giving out!” The woman held a little child hugged close to her breast; she strained him closer. “They shall not have him, anyway,” she said. Her mouth looked white and stiff.

“Put him down and help, then,” said Silence. She began pulling the pewter plates off the dresser.

“What be you doing with my pewter plates?” screamed her aunt at her elbow.

Silence said nothing. She went on piling the plates under her arm.

“Think you I will have the pewter plates I have had ever since I was wed, melted to make bullets for those limbs of Satan?”

Silence carried the plates to the fire; the women piled on wood and made it hotter. John Carson’s wife laid her baby on the settle and helped, and Widow Bishop brought out her pewter spoons, and her silver cream-jug when the pewter ran low, and finally her dead husband’s knee-buckles from the cedar chest. All the pewter and silver in Widow Eunice Bishop’s house were melted down that night. The women worked with desperate zeal to supply the men with bullets, and just before the ammunition failed, the Indians left Deerfield village, with their captives in their train.

The men had stopped firing at last. Everything was quiet outside, except for the flurry of musket-shots down on the meadow, where the skirmish was going on between the Hatfield men and the retreating French and Indians. The dawn was breaking, but not a shutter had been stirred in the Bishop house; the inmates were clustered together, their ears straining for another outburst of slaughter.

Suddenly there was a strange crackling sound overhead; a puff of hot smoke came into the room from the stairway. The roof had caught fire from the shower of sparks, and the stanch house that had withstood all the fury of the savages was going the way of its neighbors.

The men rushed up the stair, and fell back. “We can’t save it!” Captain Isaac Moulton said, hoarsely. He was an old man, and his white hair tossed wildly around his powder-blackened face.

Widow Eunice Bishop scuttled into her bedroom, and got her best silk hood and her giltframed looking-glass. “Silence, get out the feather-bed!” she shrieked.

The keeping-room was stifling with smoke. Captain Moulton loosened a window-shutter cautiously and peered out. “I see no sign of the savages,” he said. They unbolted the door, and opened it inch by inch, but there was no exultant shout in response. The crack of muskets on the meadow sounded louder; that was all.

Widow Eunice Bishop pushed forward before the others; the danger by fire to her household goods had driven her own danger from her mind, which could compass but one terror at a time. “Let me forth!” she cried; and she laid the looking-glass and silk hood on the snow, and pelted back into the smoke for her feather-bed and the best andirons.

Silence carried out the spinning-wheel, and the others caught up various articles which they had wit to see in the panic. They piled them up on the snow outside, and huddled together, staring fearfully down the village street. They saw, amid the smouldering ruins, Ensign John Sheldon’s house standing.

“We must make for that,” said Captain Isaac Moulton, and they started. The men went before and behind, with their muskets in readiness, and the women and children walked between. Widow Bishop carried the looking-glass; somebody had helped her to bring out her feather-bed, and she had dragged it to a clean place well away from the burning house.

The dawnlight lay pale and cold in the east; it was steadily overcoming the fire-glow from the ruins. Nobody would have known Deerfield village. The night before the sun had gone down upon the snowy slants of humble roofs and the peaceful rise of smoke from pleasant hearth fires. The curtained windows had gleamed out one by one with mild candle-light, and serene faces of white-capped matrons preparing supper had passed them. Now, on both sides of Deerfield street were beds of glowing red coals; grotesque ruins of door-posts and chimneys in the semblances of blackened martyrs stood crumbling in the midst of them, and twisted charred heaps, which the people eyed trembling, lay in the old doorways. The snow showed great red patches in the gathering light, and in them lay still bodies that seemed to move.

Silence Hoit sprang out from the hurrying throng, and turned the head of one dead man whose face she could not see. The horror of his red crown did not move her. She only saw that he was not David Walcott. She stooped and wiped off her hands in some snow.

“That is Israel Bennett,” the others groaned.

John Carson’s wife had been the dead man’s sister. She hugged her baby tighter, and pressed more closely to her husband’s back. There was no longer any sound of musketry on the meadows. There was not a sound to be heard except the wind in the dry trees and the panting breaths of the knot of people.

A dead baby lay directly in the path, and a woman caught it up, and tried to warm it at her breast. She wrapped her cloak around it, and wiped its little bloody face with her apron. “’Tis not dead,” she declared, frantically; “the child is not dead!” She had not shed a tear nor uttered a wail before, but now she began sobbing aloud over the dead child. It was Goodwife Barnard’s, and no kin to her; she was a single woman. The others were looking right and left for lurking savages; she looked only at the little cold face on her bosom. “The child breathes,” she said, and hurried on faster that she might get succor for it.

The party halted before Ensign John Sheldon’s house. The stout door was fast, but there was a hole in it, as if hacked by a tomahawk. The men tried it and shook it. “Open, open, Goodwife Sheldon!” they hallooed. “Friends! friends! Open the door!” But there was no response.

Silence Hoit left the throng at the door, and began clambering up on a slant of icy snow to a window which was flung wide open. The window-sill was stained with blood, and so was the snow.

One of the men caught Silence and tried to hold her back. “There may be Indians in there,” he whispered, hoarsely.

But Silence broke away from him, and was in through the window, and the men followed her, and unbolted the door for the women, who pressed in wildly, and flung it to again. A child who was among them, little Comfort Arms, stationed herself directly with her tiny back against the door, with her mouth set like a soldier’s, and her blue eyes gleaming fierce under her flaxen locks. “They shall not get in,” said she. Somehow she had gotten hold of a great horse-pistol, which she carried like a doll.

Nobody heeded her, Silence least of all. She stared about the room, with her lips parted. Right before her on the hearth lay a little three-year-old girl, Mercy Sheldon, her pretty head in a pool of blood, but Silence cast only an indifferent glance when the others gathered about her, groaning and sighing.

Suddenly Silence sprang towards a dark heap near the pantry door, but it was only a woman’s quilted petticoat.

The spinning-wheel lay broken on the floor, and all the simple furniture was strewn about wildly. Silence went into Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom, and the others followed her, trembling, all except little Comfort Arms, who stood unflinchingly with her back pressed against the door, and the single woman, Grace Mather; she stayed behind, and put wood on the fire, after she had picked up the quilted petticoat, and laid the dead baby tenderly wrapped in it on the settle. Then she pulled the settle forward before the fire, and knelt before it, and fell to chafing the little limbs of the dead baby, weeping as she did so.

Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom was in wild disorder. A candle still burned, although it was very low, on the table, whose linen cover had great red finger-prints on it. Goodwife Sheldon’s decent clothes were tossed about on the floor; the curtains of the bed were half torn away. Silence pressed forward unshrinkingly towards the bed; the others, even the men, hung back. There lay Goodwife Sheldon dead in her bed. All the light in the room, the candle-light and the low daylight, seemed to focus upon her white, frozen profile propped stiffly on the pillow, where she had fallen back when the bullet came through that hole in the door.

Silence looked at her. “Where is David, Goodwife Sheldon?” said she.

Eunice Bishop sprang forward. “Be you clean out of your mind, Silence Hoit?” she cried. “Know you not she’s dead? She’s dead! Oh, she’s dead, she’s dead! An’ here’s her best silk hood trampled underfoot on the floor!” Eunice snatched up the hood, and seized Silence by the arm, but she pushed her back.

“Where is David? Where is he gone?” she demanded again of the dead woman.

The other women came crowding around Silence then, and tried to soothe her and reason with her, while their own faces were white with horror and woe. Goodwife Sarah Spear, an old woman whose sons lay dead in the street outside, put an arm around the girl, and tried to draw her head to her broad bosom.

“Mayhap you will find him, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s not among the dead out there.”

But Silence broke away from the motherly arm, and sped wildly through the other rooms, with the people at her heels, and her aunt crying vainly after her. They found no more dead in the house; naught but ruin and disorder, and bloody footprints and handprints of savages.

When they returned to the keeping-room, Silence seated herself on a stool by the fire, and held out her hands towards the blaze to warm them. The daylight was broad outside now, and the great clock that had come from overseas ticked; the Indians had not touched that.

Captain Isaac Moulton lifted little Mercy Sheldon from the hearth and carried her to her dead mother in the bedroom, and two of the older women went in there and shut the door. Little Comfort Arms still stood with her back against the outer door, and Grace Mather tended the dead baby on the settle.

“What do ye with that dead child?” a woman called out roughly to her.

“I tell ye ’tis not dead; it breathes,” returned Grace Mather; and she never turned her harsh, plain face from the dead child.

“An’ I tell ye ’tis dead.”

“An’ I tell ye ’tis not dead. I need but some hot posset for it.”

Goodwife Carson began to weep. She hugged her own living baby tighter. “Let her alone!” she sobbed. “I wonder our wits be not all gone.” She went sobbing over to little Comfort Arms at the door. “Come away, sweetheart, and draw near the fire,” she pleaded, brokenly.

The little girl looked obstinately up at her. “They shall not come in,” she said. “The wicked savages shall not come in again.”

“No more shall they, an’ the Lord be willing, sweet. But, I pray you, come away from the door now.”

Comfort shook her head, and she looked like her father as he fought on the Deerfield meadows.

“The savages are gone, sweet.”

But Comfort answered not a word, and Goodwife Carson sat down and began to nurse her baby. One of the women hung the porridge-kettle over the fire; another put some potatoes in the ashes to bake. Presently the two women came out of Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom with grave, strained faces, and held their stiff blue fingers out to the hearth fire.

Eunice Bishop, who was stirring the porridge, looked at them with sharp curiosity. “How look they?” she whispered.

“As peaceful as if they slept,” replied Goodwife Spear, who was one of the women.

“And the child’s head?”

“We put on her little white cap with the lace frills.”

Eunice stirred the bubbling porridge, scowling in the heat and steam; some of the women laid the table with Hannah Sheldon’s linen cloth and pewter dishes, and presently the breakfast was dished up.

Little Comfort Arms had sunk at the foot of the nail-studded door in a deep slumber. She slept at her post like the faithless sentry whose slumbers the night before had brought about the destruction of Deerfield village. Goodwife Spear raised her up, but her curly head drooped helplessly.

“Wake up, Comfort, and have a sup of hot porridge,” she called in her ear.

She led her over to the table, Comfort stumbling weakly at arm’s-length, and set her on a stool with a dish of porridge before her, which she ate uncertainly in a dazed fashion, with her eyes filming and her head nodding.

They all gathered gravely around the table, except Silence Hoit and Grace Mather. Silence sat still, staring at the fire, and Grace had dipped out a little cup of the hot porridge, and was trying to feed it to the dead baby, with crooning words.

“Silence, why come you not to the table?” her aunt called out.

“I want nothing,” answered Silence.

“I see not why you should so set yourself up before the others, as having so much more to bear,” said Eunice, sharply. “There is Goodwife Spear, with her sons unburied on the road yonder, and she eats her porridge with good relish.”

John Carson’s wife set her baby on her husband’s knee, and carried a dish of porridge to Silence.

“Try and eat it, sweet,” she whispered. She was near Silence’s age.

Silence looked up at her. “I want it not,” said she.

“But he may not be dead, sweet. He may presently be home. You would not he should find you spent and fainting. Perchance he may have wounds for you to tend.”

Silence seized the dish and began to eat the porridge in great spoonfuls, gulping it down fast.

The people at the table eyed her sadly and whispered, and they also cast frequent glances at Grace Mather bending over the dead baby. Once Captain Isaac Moulton called out to her in his gruff old voice, which he tried to soften, and she answered back, sharply: “Think ye I will leave this child while it breathes, Captain Isaac Moulton? In faith I am the only one of ye all who has regard to it.”

But suddenly, when the meal was half over, Grace Mather arose, and gathered up the little dead baby, carried it into Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom, and was gone some time.

“She has lost her wits,” said Eunice Bishop. “Think you not we should follow her? She may do some harm.”

“Nay, let her be,” said Goodwife Spear.

When at last Grace Mather came out of the bedroom, and they all turned to look at her, her face was stern but quite composed. “I found a little clean linen shift in the chest,” she said to Goodwife Spear, who nodded gravely. Then she sat down at the table and ate.

The people, as they ate, cast frequent glances at the barred door and the shuttered windows. The daylight was broad outside, but there was no glimmer of it in the room, and the candles were lighted. They dared not yet remove the barricades, and the muskets were in readiness: the Indians might return.

All at once there was a shrill clamor at the door, and men sprang to their muskets. The women clutched each other, panting.

“Unbar the door!” shrieked a quavering old voice. “I tell ye, unbar the door! I be nigh frozen a-standing here. Unbar the door! The Indians are gone hours ago.”

“’Tis Goody Crane!” cried Eunice Bishop.

Captain Isaac Moulton shot back the bolts and opened the door a little way, while the men stood close at his back, and Goody Crane slid in like a swift black shadow out of the daylight.

She crouched down close to the fire, trembling and groaning, and the women gave her some hot porridge.

“Where have ye been?” demanded Eunice Bishop.

“Where they found me not,” replied the old woman, and there was a sudden leer like a light in the gloom of her great hood. She motioned towards the bedroom door.

“Goody Sheldon sleeps late this morning, and so doth Mercy,” said she. “I trow she will not dip her candles to-day.”

The people looked at each other; a subtler horror than that of the night before shook their spirits.

Captain Isaac Moulton towered over the old woman on the hearth. “How knew you Goodwife Sheldon and Mercy were dead?” he asked, sternly.

The old woman leered up at him undauntedly; her head bobbed. There was a curious grotesqueness about her blanketed and hooded figure when in motion. There was so little of the old woman herself visible that motion surprised, as it would have done in a puppet. “Told I not Goody Sheldon last night she would never stir porridge again?” said she. “Who stirred the porridge this morning? I trow Goody Sheldon’s hands be too stiff and too cold, though they have stirred well in their day. Hath she dipped her candles yet? Hath she begun on her weaving? I trow ’twill be a long day ere Mary Sheldon’s linen-chest be filled, if she herself go a-gadding to Canada and her mother sleep so late.”

“Eat this hot porridge and stop your croaking,” said Goodwife Spear, stooping over her.

The old woman extended her two shaking hands for the dish. “That was what she said last night,” she returned. “The living echo the dead, and that is enough wisdom for a witch.”

“You’ll be burned for a witch yet, Goody Crane, an you be not careful,” cried Eunice Bishop.

“There is fire enough outside to burn all the witches in the land,” muttered the old woman, sipping her porridge. Suddenly she eyed Silence sitting motionless opposite. “Where be your sweetheart this fine morning, Silence Hoit?” she inquired.

Silence looked at her. There was a strange likeness between the glitter in her blue eyes and that in Goody Crane’s black ones.

The old woman’s great hood nodded over the porridge-dish. “I can tell ye, Mistress Silence,” she said, thickly, as she ate. “He is gone to Canada on a moose-hunt, and unless I be far wrong, he hath taken thy wits with him.”

“How know you David Walcott is gone to Canada?” cried Eunice Bishop; and Silence stared at her with her hard blue eyes.

Silence’s soft fair hair hung all matted like uncombed flax over her pale cheeks. There was a rigid, dead look about her girlish forehead and her sweet mouth.

“I know,” returned Goody Crane, nodding her head.

The women washed the pewter dishes, set them back on the dresser, and swept the floor. Little Comfort Arms had been carried up-stairs and laid in the bed whence poor Mary Sheldon had been dragged and haled to Canada. The men stood talking near their stacked muskets. One of the shutters had been opened and the candles put out. The winter sun shone in the window as it had shone before, but the poor folk in Ensign Sheldon’s keeping-room saw it with a certain shock, as if it were a stranger. That morning their own hearts had in them such strangeness that they transferred it like motion to all familiar objects. The very iron dogs in the Sheldon fireplace seemed on the leap with tragedy, and the porridge-kettle swung darkly out of some former age.

Now and then one of the men opened the door cautiously and peered out and listened. The reek of the smouldering village came in at the door, but there was not a sound except the whistling howl of the savage north wind, which still swept over the valley. There was not a shot to be heard from the meadows. The men discussed the wisdom of leaving the women for a short space and going forth to explore, but Widow Eunice Bishop interposed, thrusting her sharp face in among them.

“Here we be,” scolded she, “a passel of women and children, and Hannah Sheldon and Mercy a-lying dead, and me with my house burnt down, and nothing saved except my silk hood and my looking-glass and my feather-bed, and it’s a mercy if that’s not all smooched, and you talk of going off and leaving us!”

The men looked doubtfully at one another; then there was the hissing creak of footsteps on the snow outside, and Widow Bishop screamed. “Oh, the Indians have come back!” she proclaimed.

Silence looked up.

The door was tried from without.

“Who’s there?” cried out Captain Moulton.

“John Sheldon,” responded a hoarse voice. “Who’s inside?”

Captain Moulton threw open the door, and John Sheldon stood there. His severe and sober face was painted like an Indian’s with blood and powder grime; he stood staring in at the company.

“Come in, quick, and let us bar the door!” screamed Eunice Bishop.

John Sheldon came in hesitatingly, and stood looking around the room.

“Have you but just come from the meadows?” inquired Captain Moulton. But John Sheldon did not seem to hear him. He stared at the company, who all stood still staring back at him; then he looked hard and long at the doors, as if expecting some one to enter. The eyes of the others followed his, but no one spoke.

“Where’s Hannah?” asked John Sheldon.

Then the women began to weep.

“She’s in there,” sobbed John Carson’s wife, pointing to the bedroom door--“in there with little Mercy, Goodman Sheldon.”

“Is--the child hurt, and--Hannah a-tending her?”

The women wept, and pushed each other forward to tell him, but Captain Isaac Moulton spoke out, and drove the knife home like an honest soldier, who will kill if he must, but not mangle.

“Goodwife Sheldon lies yonder, shot dead in her bed, and we found the child dead on the hearth-stone,” said Isaac Moulton.

John Sheldon turned his gaze on him.

“The judgments of the Lord are just and righteous altogether,” said Isaac Moulton, confronting him with stern defiance.

“Amen,” returned John Sheldon. He took off his cloak, and hung it up on the peg as he was used.

“Where is David Walcott?” asked Silence, standing before him.

“David, he is gone with the Indians to Canada, and the boys, Ebenezer and Remembrance.”

“Where is David?”

“I tell ye, lass, he is gone with the French and Indians to Canada; and you need be thankful he was but your sweetheart, and ye not wed, with a half-score of babes to be taken too. The curse that was upon the women of Jerusalem is upon the women of Deerfield.” John Sheldon looked sternly into Silence’s white wild face; then his voice softened. “Take heart, lass,” said he. “Erelong I shall go to Governor Dudley and get help, and then after them to Canada, and fetch them back. Take heart; I will fetch thee thy sweetheart presently.”

Silence returned to her seat in the fireplace. Goody Crane looked across at her. “He will come back over the north meadow,” she whispered. “Keep watch over the north meadow; but ’twill be a long day ere ye see him.”

Silence paid seemingly little heed. She paid little heed to Ensign John Sheldon relating how the French and Indians, with Hertel de Rouville at their head, were on the road to Canada with their captives; of the fight on the meadow between the retreating foe and the brave band of Deerfield and Hatfield men, who had made a stand there to intercept them; how they had been obliged to cease firing because the captives were threatened; and the pitiful tale of Parson John Williams, two of whose children were killed, dragged through the wilderness with the others, and his sick wife.

“Had folk listened to him, we had all been safe in our good houses with our belongings,” cried Eunice Bishop.

“They will not drag Goodwife Williams far,” said Goody Crane, “nor the babe at her breast. I trow well it hath stopped wailing ere now.”

“How know you that?” questioned Eunice Bishop, turning sharply on her.

But the old woman only nodded her head, and Silence paid no heed, for she was not there. Her slender girlish shape sat by the hearth fire in John Sheldon’s house in Deerfield, her fair head showed like a delicate flower, but Silence Hoit was following her lover to Canada. Every step that he took painfully through pathless forests, on treacherous ice, and desolate snow fields, she took more painfully still; every knife gleaming over his head she saw. She bore his every qualm of hunger and pain and cold, and it was all the harder because they struck on her bare heart with no flesh between, for she sat in the flesh in Deerfield, and her heart went with her lover to Canada.

The sun stood higher, but it was still bitter cold; the blue frost on the windows did not melt, and the icicles on the eaves, which nearly touched the sharp snow-drifts underneath, did not drip. The desolate survivors of the terrible night began work among the black ruins of their homes. They cared as well as they might for the dead in Deerfield street, and the dead on the meadow where the fight had been. Their muscles were all tense with the cold, their faces seamed and blue with it, but their hearts were strained with a fiercer cold than that. Not one man of them but had one or more slain, with dead face upturned, seeking his in the morning light, or on that awful road to Canada. Ever as the men worked they turned their eyes northward, and met grimly the icy blast of the north wind, and sometimes to their excited fancies it seemed to bring to their ears the cries of their friends who were facing it also, and they stood still and listened.

Silence Hoit crept out of the house and down the road a little way, and then stood looking over the meadow towards the north. Her fair hair tossed in the wind, her pale cheeks turned pink, the wind struck full upon her delicate figure. She had come out without her blanket.

“David!” she called. “David! David! David!” The north wind bore down upon her, shrieking with a wild fury like a savage of the air; the dry branches of a small tree near her struck her in the face. “David!” she called again. “David! David!” She swelled out her white throat like a bird, and her voice was shrill and sweet and far-reaching. The men moving about on the meadow below, and stooping over the dead, looked up at her, but she did not heed them. She had come through a break in the palisades; on each side of her the frozen snow-drifts slanted sharply to their tops, and they glittered with blue lights like glaciers in the morning sun over those drifts the enemy had passed the night before.

The men on the meadow saw Silence’s hair blowing like a yellow banner between the drifts of snow.

“The poor lass has come out bareheaded,” said Ensign Sheldon. “She is near out of her mind for David Walcott.”

Comments

Silence, and other storiesChapter I: Part 1

0%36 min left in chapter