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To Have and To Hold:

M >> Mary Johnston >> To Have and To Hold:




Opechancanough we rarely saw, though we were bestowed so near
to him that his sentinels served for ours. Like some god, he kept
within his lodge with the winding passage, and the hanging mats
between him and the world without. At other times, issuing from
that retirement, he would stride away into the forest. Picked men
went with him, and they were gone for hours; but when they
returned they bore no trophies, brute or human. What they did we
could not guess. We might have had much comfort in Nantauquas,
but the morning after our arrival in this village the Emperor sent
him upon an embassy to the Rappahannocks, and when for the
fourth time the forest stood black against the sunset he had not
returned. If escape had been possible, we would not have awaited
the doubtful fulfillment of that promise made to us below the
Uttamussac temples. But the vigilance of the Indians never slept;
they watched us like hawks, night and day. And the dry leaves
underfoot would not hold their peace, and there were the marshes
to cross and the river.

Thus four days dragged themselves by, and in the early morning of
the fifth, when we came from our wigwam, it was to find
Nantauquas sitting by the fire, magnificent in the paint and
trappings of the ambassador, motionless as a piece of bronze, and
apparently quite unmindful of the admiring glances of the women
who knelt about the fire preparing our breakfast. When he saw us
he rose and came to meet us, and I embraced him, I was so glad to
see him. "The Rappahannocks feasted me long," he said. "I was
afraid that Captain Percy would be gone to Jamestown before I
was back upon the Pamunkey."

"Shall I ever see Jamestown again, Nantauquas?" I demanded. "I
have my doubts."

He looked me full in the eyes, and there was no doubting the
candor of his own. "You go with the next sunrise," he answered.
"Opechancanough has given me his word."

"I am glad to hear it," I said. "Why have we been kept at all? Why
did he not free us five days agone?"

He shook his head. "I do not know. Opechancanough has many
thoughts which he shares with no man. But now he will send you
with presents for the Governor, and with messages of his love to
the white men. There will be a great feast to-day, and to-night the
young men and maidens will dance before you. Then in the
morning you will go."

"Will you not come with us?" I asked. "You are ever welcome
amongst us, Nantauquas, both for your sister's sake and for your
own. Rolfe will rejoice to have you with him again; he ever
grudgeth you to the forest."

He shook his head again. "Nantauquas, the son of Powhatan, hath
had much talk with himself lately," he said simply. "The white
men's ways have seemed very good to him, and the God of the
white men he knows to be greater than Okee, and to be good and
tender; not like Okee, who sucks the blood of the children. He
remembers Matoax, too, and how she loved and cared for the
white men and would weep when danger threatened them. And
Rolfe is his brother and his teacher. But Opechancanough is his
king, and the red men are his people, and the forest is his home. If,
because he loved Rolfe, and because the ways of the white men
seemed to him better than his own ways, he forgot these things, he
did wrong, and the One over All frowns upon him. Now he has
come back to his home again, to the forest and the hunting and the
warpath, to his king and his people. He will be again the panther
crouching upon the bough" -

"Above the white men?"

He gazed at me in silence, a shadow upon his face. "Above the
Monacans," he answered slowly. "Why did Captain Percy say
'above the white men'? Opechancanough and the English have
buried the hatchet forever, and the smoke of the peace pipe will
never fade from the air. Nantauquas meant 'above the Monacans or
the Long House dogs.' "

I put my hand upon his shoulder. "I know you did, brother of Rolfe
by nature if not by blood! Forget what I said; it was without
thought or meaning. If we go indeed to-morrow, I shall be loath to
leave you behind; and yet, were I in your place, I should do as you
are doing."

The shadow left his face and he drew himself up. "Is it what you
call faith and loyalty and like a knight?" he demanded, with a
touch of eagerness breaking through the slowness and gravity with
which an Indian speaks.

"Yea," I made reply. "I think you good knight and true,
Nantauquas, and my friend, moreover, who saved my life."

His smile was like his sister's, quick and very bright, and leaving
behind it a most entire gravity. Together we sat down by the fire
and ate of the sylvan breakfast, with shy brown maidens to serve
us and with the sunshine streaming down upon us through the trees
that were growing faintly green. It was a thing to smile at to see
how the Indian girls manoeuvred to give the choicest meat, the
most delicate maize cakes, to the young war chief, and to see how
quietly he turned aside their benevolence. The meal over, he went
to divest himself of his red and white paint, of the stuffed hawk
and strings of copper that formed his headdress, of his gorgeous
belt and quiver and his mantle of raccoon skins, while Diccon and
I sat still before our wigwam, smoking, and reckoning the distance
to Jamestown and the shortest time in which we could cover it.

When we had sat there for an hour the old men and the warriors
came to visit us, and the smoking must commence all over again.
The women laid mats in a great half circle, and each savage took
his seat with perfect breeding; that is, in absolute silence and with
a face like a stone. The peace paint was upon them all, - red, or
red and white; they sat and looked at the ground until I had made
the speech of welcome. Soon the air was dense with the fragrant
smoke; in the thick blue haze the sweep of painted figures had the
seeming of some fantastic dream. An old man arose and made a
long and touching speech with much reference to calumets and
buried hatchets. When he had finished a chief talked of
Opechancanough's love for the English, "high as the stars, deep as
Popogusso, wide as from the sunrise to the sunset," adding that the
death of Nemattanow last year and the troubles over the hunting
grounds had kindled in the breasts of the Indians no desire for
revenge. With which highly probable statement he made an end,
and all sat in silence looking at me and waiting for my
contribution of honeyed words. These Pamunkeys, living at a
distance from the settlements, had but little English to their credit,
and the learning of the Paspaheghs was not much greater. I sat and
repeated to them the better part of the seventh canto of the second
book of Master Spenser's "Faery Queen." Then I told them the
story of the Moor of Venice, and ended by relating Smith's tale of
the three Turks' heads. It all answered the purpose to admiration.
When at length they went away to change their paint for the
coming feast Diccon and I laughed at that foolery as though there
were none beside us who could juggle with words. We were as
light-hearted as children - God forgive us!

The day wore on, with relay after relay of food which we must
taste at least, with endless smoking of pipes and speeches that
must be listened to and answered. When evening came and our
entertainers drew off to prepare for the dance, they left us as
wearied as by a long day's march.

The wind had been high during the day, but with the sunset it sank
to a desolate murmur. The sky wore the strange crimson of the past
year at Weyanoke. Against that sea of color the pines were drawn
in ink, and beneath it the winding, threadlike creeks that pierced
the marshes had the look of spilt blood moving slowly and heavily
to join the river that was black where the pines shadowed it, red
where the light touched it. From the marsh arose the cry of some
great bird that made its home there; it had a lonely and a boding
sound, like a trumpet blown above the dead. The color died into an
ashen gray and the air grew cold, with a heaviness beside that
dragged at the very soul. Diccon shivered violently, turned
restlessly upon the log that served him as settle, and began to
mutter to himself.

"Art cold?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Something walked over my grave," he said. "I
would give all the pohickory that was ever brewed by heathen for a
toss of aqua vit‘!"

In the centre of the village rose a great heap of logs and dry
branches, built during the day by the women and children. When
the twilight fell and the owls began to hoot this pile was fired, and
lit the place from end to end. The scattered wigwams, the
scaffolding where the fish were dried, the tall pines and
wide-branching mulberries, the trodden grass, - all flashed into
sight as the flame roared up to the top-most withered bough. The
village glowed like a lamp set in the dead blackness of marsh and
forest. Opechancanough came from the forest with a score of
warriors behind him, and stopped beside me. I rose to greet him, as
was decent; for he was an Emperor, albeit a savage and a pagan.
"Tell the English that Opechancanough grows old," he said. "The
years that once were as light upon him as the dew upon the maize
are now hailstones to beat him back to the earth whence he came.
His arm is not swift to strike and strong as it once was. He is old;
the warpath and the scalp dance please him no longer. He would
die at peace with all men. Tell the English this; tell them also that
Opechancanough knows that they are good and just, that they do
not treat men whose color is not their own like babes, fooling them
with toys, thrusting them out of their path when they grow
troublesome. The land is wide and the hunting grounds are many.
Let the red men who were here as many moons ago as there are
leaves in summer and the white men who came yesterday dwell
side by side in peace, sharing the maize fields and the weirs and
the hunting grounds together." He waited not for my answer, but
passed on, and there was no sign of age in his stately figure and his
slow, firm step. I watched him with a frown until the darkness of
his lodge had swallowed up him and his warriors, and mistrusted
him for a cold and subtle devil.

Suddenly, as we sat staring at the fire we were beset by a band of
maidens, coming out of the woods, painted, with antlers upon their
heads and pine branches in their hands. They danced about us, now
advancing until the green needles met above our heads, now
retreating until there was a space of turf between us. Their slender
limbs gleamed in the firelight; they moved with grace, keeping
time to a plaintive song, now raised by the whole choir, now fallen
to a single voice. Pocahontas had danced thus before the English
many a time. I thought of the little maid, of her great wondering
eyes and her piteous, untimely death, of how loving she was to
Rolfe and how happy they had been in their brief wedded life. It
had bloomed like a rose, as fair and as early fallen, with only a
memory of past sweetness. Death was a coward, passing by men
whose trade it was to out-brave him, and striking at the young and
lovely and innocent. . . .

We were tired with all the mummery of the day; moreover, every
fibre of our souls had been strained to meet the hours that had
passed since we left the gaol at Jamestown. The elation we had felt
earlier in the day was all gone. Now, the plaintive song, the
swaying figures, the red light beating against the trees, the
blackness of the enshrouding forest, the low, melancholy wind, -
all things seemed strange, and yet deadly old, as though we had
seen and heard them since the beginning of the world. All at once
a fear fell upon me, causeless and unreasonable, but weighing
upon my heart like a stone. She was in a palisaded town, under the
Governor's protection, with my friends about her and my enemy
lying sick, unable to harm her. It was I, not she, that was in danger.
I laughed at myself, but my heart was heavy, and I was in a fever
to be gone.

The Indian girls danced more and more swiftly, and their song
changed, becoming gay and shrill and sweet. Higher and higher
rang the notes, faster and faster moved the dark limbs; then, quite
suddenly, song and motion ceased together. They who had danced
with the abandonment of wild priestesses to some wild god were
again but shy brown Indian maids who went and set them meekly
down upon the grass beneath the trees. From the darkness now
came a burst of savage cries only less appalling than the war
whoop itself. In a moment the men of the village had rushed from
the shadow of the trees into the broad, firelit space before us. Now
they circled around us, now around the fire; now each man danced
and stamped and muttered to himself. For the most part they were
painted red, but some were white from head to heel, - statues come
to life, - while others had first oiled their bodies, then plastered
them over with small bright-colored feathers. The tall headdresses
made giants of them all; as they leaped and danced in the glare of
the fire they had a fiendish look. They sang, too, but the air was
rude, and broken by dreadful cries. Out of a hut behind us burst
two or three priests, the conjurer, and a score or more of old men.
They had Indian drums upon which they beat furiously, and long
pipes made of reeds which gave forth no uncertain sound. Fixed
upon a pole and borne high above them was the image of their
Okee, a hideous thing of stuffed skins and rattling chains of
copper. When they had joined themselves to the throng in the
firelight the clamor became deafening. Some one piled on more
logs, and the place grew light as day. Opechancanough was not
there, nor Nantauquas.

Diccon and I watched that uncouth spectacle, that Virginian
masque, as we had watched many another one, with disgust and
weariness. It would last, we knew, for the better part of the night.
It was in our honor, and for a while we must stay and testify our
pleasure; but after a time, when they had sung and danced
themselves into oblivion of our presence, we might retire, and
leave the very old men, the women, and the children sole
spectators. We waited for that relief with impatience, though we
showed it not to those who pressed about us.

Time passed, and the noise deepened and the dancing became
more frantic. The dancers struck at one another as they leaped and
whirled, the sweat rolled from their bodies, and from their lips
came hoarse, animal-like cries. The fire, ever freshly fed, roared
and crackled, mocking the silent stars. The pines were bronze-red,
the woods beyond a dead black. All noises of marsh and forest
were lost in the scream of the pipes, the wild yelling, and the
beating of the drums.

From the ranks of the women beneath the reddened pines rose
shrill laughter and applause as they sat or knelt, bent forward,
watching the dancers. One girl alone watched not them, but us.
She stood somewhat back of her companions, one slim brown
hand touching the trunk of a tree, one brown foot advanced, her
attitude that of one who waits but for a signal to be gone. Now and
then she glanced impatiently at the wheeling figures, or at the old
men and the few warriors who took no part in the masque, but her
eyes always came back to us. She had been among the maidens
who danced before us earlier in the night; when they rested
beneath the trees she had gone away, and the night was much older
when I marked her again, coming out of the firelit distance back to
the fire and her dusky mates. It was soon after this that I became
aware that she must have some reason for her anxious scrutiny,
some message to deliver or warning to give. Once when I made a
slight motion as if to go to her, she shook her head and laid her
finger upon her lips.

A dancer fell from sheer exhaustion, another and another, and
warriors from the dozen or more seated at our right began to take
the places of the fallen. The priests shook their rattles, and made
themselves dizzy with bending and whirling about their Okee; the
old men, too, though they sat like statues, thought only of the
dance, and of how they themselves had excelled, long ago when
they were young.

I rose, and making my way to the werowance of the village where
he sat with his eyes fixed upon a young Indian, his son, who bade
fair to outlast all others in that wild contest, told him that I was
wearied and would go to my hut, I and my servant, to rest for the
few hours that yet remained of the night. He listened dreamily, his
eyes upon the dancing Indian, but made offer to escort me thither.
I pointed out to him that my quarters were not fifty yards away, in
the broad firelight, in sight of them all, and that it were a pity to
take him or any others from the contemplation of that whirling
Indian, so strong and so brave that he would surely one day lead
the war parties.

After a moment he acquiesced, and Diccon and I, quietly and yet
with some ostentation, so as to avoid all appearance of stealing
away, left the press of savages and began to cross the firelit turf
between them and our lodge. When we had gone fifty paces I
glanced over my shoulder and saw that the Indian maid no longer
stood where we had last seen her, beneath the pines. A little farther
on we caught a glimpse of her winding in and out among a row of
trees to our left. The trees ran past our lodge. When we had
reached its entrance we paused and looked back to the throng we
had left. Every back seemed turned to us, every eye intent upon the
leaping figures around the great fire. Swiftly and quietly we
walked across the bit of even ground to the friendly trees, and
found ourselves in a thin strip of shadow between the light of the
great fire we had left and that of a lesser one burning redly before
the Emperor's lodge. Beneath the trees, waiting for us, was the
Indian maid, with her light form, and large, shy eyes, and finger
upon her lips. She would not speak or tarry, but flitted before us as
dusk and noiseless as a moth, and we followed her into the
darkness beyond the firelight, well-nigh to the line of sentinels. A
wigwam, larger than common and shadowed by trees, rose in our
path; the girl, gliding in front of us, held aside the mats that
curtained the entrance. We hesitated a moment, then stooped and
entered the place.



CHAPTER XXXIII IN WHICH MY FRIEND BECOMES MY FOE


IN the centre of the wigwam the customary fire burned clear and
bright, showing the white mats, the dressed skins, the implements
of war hanging upon the bark walls, - all the usual furniture of an
Indian dwelling, - and showing also Nantauquas standing against
the stripped trunk of a pine that pierced the wigwam from floor to
roof. The fire was between us. He stood so rigid, at his full height,
with folded arms and head held high, and his features were so
blank and still, so forced and frozen, as it were, into composure,
that, with the red light beating upon him and the thin smoke
curling above his head, he had the look of a warrior tied to the
stake.

"Nantauquas!" I exclaimed, and striding past the fire would have
touched him but that with a slight and authoritative motion of the
hand he kept me back. Otherwise there was no change in his
position or in the dead calm of his face.

The Indian maid had dropped the mat at the entrance, and if she
waited, waited without in the darkness. Diccon, now staring at the
young chief, now eyeing the weapons upon the wall with all a
lover's passion, kept near the doorway. Through the thickness of
the bark and woven twigs the wild cries and singing came to us
somewhat faintly; beneath that distant noise could be heard the
wind in the trees and the soft fall of the burning pine.

"Well!" I asked at last. "What is the matter, my friend?"

For a full minute he made no answer, and when he did speak his
voice matched his face.

"My friend," he said, "I am going to show myself a friend indeed to
the English, to the strangers who were not content with their own
hunting grounds beyond the great salt water. When I have done
this, I do not know that Captain Percy will call me 'friend' again."

"You were wont to speak plainly, Nantauquas," I answered him. "I
am not fond of riddles."

Again he waited, as though he found speech difficult. I stared at
him in amazement, he was so changed in so short a time.

He spoke at last: "When the dance is over, and the fires are low,
and the sunrise is at hand, then will Opechancanough come to you
to bid you farewell. He will give you the pearls that he wears about
his neck for a present to the Governor, and a bracelet for yourself.
Also he will give you three men for a guard through the forest. He
has messages of love to send the white men, and he would send
them by you who were his enemy and his captive. So all the white
men shall believe in his love."

"Well," I said dryly as he paused. "I will take his messages. What
next?"

"Those are the words of Opechancanough. Now listen to the words
of Nantauquas, the son of Wahunsonacock, a war chief of the
Powhatans. There are two sharp knives there, hanging beneath the
bow and the quiver and the shield. Take them and hide them."

The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Diccon had the
two keen English blades. I took the one he offered me, and hid it in
my doublet.

"So we go armed, Nantauquas," I said. "Love and peace and
goodwill consort not with such toys."

"You may want them," he went on, with no change in his low,
measured tones. "If you see aught in the forest that you should not
see, if they think you know more than you are meant to know, then
those three, who have knives and tomahawks, are to kill you,
whom they believe unarmed."

"See aught that we should not see, know more than we are meant
to know?" I said. "To the point, friend."

"They will go slowly, too, through the forest to Jamestown,
stopping to eat and to sleep. For them there is no need to run like
the stag with the hunter behind him."

"Then we should make for Jamestown as for life," I said, "not
sleeping or eating or making pause?"

"Yea," he replied, "if you would not die, you and all your people."

In the silence of the hut the fire crackled, and the branches of the
trees outside, bent by the wind, made a grating sound against the
bark roof.

"How die?" I asked at last. "Speak out!"

"Die by the arrow and the tomahawk," he answered, - "yea, and by
the guns you have given the red men. To-morrow's sun, and the
next, and the next, - three suns, - and the tribes will fall upon the
English. At the same hour, when the men are in the fields and the
women and children are in the houses, they will strike, -
Kecoughtans, Paspaheghs, Chickahominies, Pamunkeys,
Arrowhatocks, Chesapeakes, Nansemonds, Accomacs, - as one
man will they strike; and from where the Powhatan falls over the
rocks to the salt water beyond Accomac, there will not be one
white man left alive."

He ceased to speak, and for a minute the fire made the only sound
in the hut. Then, "All die?" I asked dully. "There are three
thousand Englishmen in Virginia."

"They are scattered and unwarned. The fighting men of the
villages of the Powhatan and the Pamunkey and the great bay are
many, and they have sharpened their hatchets and filled their
quivers with arrows."

"Scattered," I said, " strewn broadcast up and down the river, - here
a lonely house, there a cluster of two or three; they at Jamestown
and Henricus off guard, - the men in the fields or at the wharves,
the women and the children busy within doors, all unwarned - O
my God!"

Diccon strode over from the doorway to the fire. "We'd best be
going, I reckon, sir," he cried. "Or you wait until morning; then
there'll be two chances. Now that I've a knife, I'm thinking I can
give account of one of them damned sentries, at least. Once clear
of them" -

I shook my head, and the Indian too made a gesture of dissent.
"You would only be the first to die."

I leaned against the side of the hut, for my heart beat like a
frightened woman's. "Three days!" I exclaimed. "If we go with all
our speed we shall be in time. When did you learn this thing?"

"While you watched the dance," he answered, "Opechancanough
and I sat within his lodge in the darkness. His heart was moved,
and he talked to me of his own youth in a strange country, south of
the sunset, where he and his people dwelt in stone houses and
worshiped a great and fierce god, giving him blood to drink and
flesh to eat. To that country, too, white men had come in ships.
Then he spoke to me of Powhatan, my father, - of how wise he was
and how great a chief before the English came, and how the
English made him kneel in sign that he held his lands from their
King, and how he hated them; and then he told me that the tribes
had called me 'woman,' 'lover no longer of the warpath and the
scalp dance,' but that he, who had no son, loved me as his son,
knowing my heart to be Indian still; and then I heard what I have
told you."

"How long had this been planned?"

"For many moons. I have been a child, fooled and turned aside
from the trail; not wise enough to see it beneath the flowers,
through the smoke of the peace pipes."

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