The Pilgrims of New England, Mrs. J. B. Webb [best books to read in your 20s TXT] 📗

dropping the flowers that filled his little hands, he gently clasped them as if in prayer, and looked long and searchingly into his father's eyes.

'There, now you look exactly as my brother used to do when he knelt at my mother's knee, and she taught him to lisp his evening prayer,' exclaimed Henrich and his eyes glistened with emotion, as home, and all its loved associations, rushed into his mind.

Oriana saw his sadness; and felt--as she often had done before on similar occasions--a pang of painful regret, and even of jealousy, towards those much-loved relatives whom her husband still so deeply regretted. She laid her hand on his, and raising her large expressive eyes to his now melancholy countenance, she gently said--

'Does Henrich still grieve that the red men stole him away from the home of his childhood, and brought him to dwell among the forests? Is not Oriana better to him than a sister, and are not the smiles of his own Ludovico sweeter to his heart than even those of his little brother used to be? And is not my father his father also? O Henrich--my own Henrich'--she added, while she leaned her head on his shoulder, and tears burst from her eyes, and chased each other down her clear olive checks, to which deep emotion now gave a richer glow--'tell me, do you wish to be set free from all the ties that bind you to our race, and return to your own people, to dwell again with them; and, perhaps, to lift the tomahawk, and east the spear against those who have loved you, and cherished you so fondly? Often have you told me that your Indian wife and child are dearer to you than all that you have left behind you at New Plymouth. But tell it to me again! Let me hear you say again that you are happy here, and will never desert us; for when I see that sorrowful look in your dear eyes, and remember all you have lost, and still are losing, to live in a wilderness with wild and savage men, my heart misgives me; and I feel that you were never made for such a life, and that your love is far too precious to be given for ever to an Indian girl.'

The smile returned to Henrich's eyes, as he listened to this fond appeal; and he almost reproached himself for ever suffering regret for the blessings he had lost to arise in his mind, when those he still possessed were so many and so great.

'Dear Oriana, you need not fear,' he replied, affectionately; 'I speak the truth of my heart when I tell you that I would not exchange my Indian home, and sacrifice my Indian squaw, and my little half-bred son, for all the comforts and pleasures of civilized life--no, not even to be restored to the parents I still love so dearly, and the brother and sister who played with me in childhood. But still I yearn to look upon their faces again, and to hear once more their words of love. I well know how they have all mourned for me: and I know how, even after so many years have passed, they would rejoice at finding me again!'

'Yes; they must indeed have mourned for you, Henrich. That must have been a sad night to them when Coubitant bore you away. But I owe all the happiness of my life to that cruel deed--and can I regret it? If my "white brother" had not come to our camp, I should have lived and died an ignorant Indian squaw--I should have known no thing of true religion, or of the Christian's God--and,' continued Oriana, smiling at her husband with a sweetness and archness of expression that made her countenance really beautiful, 'I should never have known my Henrich.'

'Child!' said old Tisquantum, rousing himself from the half-dreamy reverie in which he had been sitting, and enjoying the warm sunbeams as they fell on his now feeble limbs, and long white hair. 'Child, are you talking again of Henrich leaving us? It is wrong of you to doubt him. My son has given me his word that he will never take you from me until Mahneto recalls my spirit to himself, and I dwell again with my fathers. Has he not also said that he will never leave or forsake you and his boy? Why, then, do you make your heart sad? Henrich has never deceived us--he has never, in all the years that he has lived in our wigwam, and shared our wanderings, said the thing that was not: and shall we suspect him now? No, Oriana; I trust him as I would have trusted my own Tekoa: and had my brave boy lived he could not have been dearer to me than Henrich is. He could not have surpassed him in hunting or in war: he could not have guided and governed my people with more wisdom, now that I am too old and feeble to be their leader: and he could not have watched over my declining years with more of gentleness and love. Henrich will never desert us: no, not if we return to the head-quarters of our tribe near Paomet,[*] as I hope to do ere I close my eyes in death. So long as I feared my white son would leave us, and return to his own people, I never turned my feet towards Paomet; for he had wound himself into my heart, and had taken Tekoa's place there: and I saw that he had wound himself into your heart too, my child; and I knew that he was more to us than the land of our birth. Therefore I have kept my hunters wandering from north to south, and from east to west, and have visited the mountains, and the prairies, and the mighty rivers, and the great lakes; and have found a home in all. But now our Henrich is one of us, and never will forsake us for any others. Is he not Sachem of my warriors, and do they not look to him as their leader and their father? No; Henrich will never leave us now!'

[Footnote: The native name for Cape Cod, near which the main body of the Nausetts resided.]

And the old man, who had become excited during this long harangue, smiled at his children with love and confidence, and again leaned back and closed his eyes, relapsing into that quiet dreamy state in which the Indians, especially the more aged among them, are so fond of indulging.

Tisquantum was now a very old man; and the great changes and vicissitudes of climate and mode of life, and the severe bodily exertions in warfare and hunting, to which he had been all his life exposed, made him appear more advanced in years than he actually was. Since the marriage of his daughter to the white stranger--which occurred about three years previous to the time at which our narrative has now arrived--he had indulged himself in an almost total cessation from business, and from every active employment, and had resigned the government of his followers into the able and energetic hands of his son-in-law. Henrich was now regarded as Chieftain of that branch of the Nausett tribe over which Tisquantum held authority; and so much had he. made himself both loved and respected during his residence among the red men, that all jealousy of his English origin and foreign complexion had gradually died away, and his guidance in war or in council was always promptly and implicitly followed.

And Henrich was happy--very happy--in his wild and wandering life. He had passed from boyhood to manhood amid the scenery and the inhabitants of the wilderness; and though his heart and his memory would still frequently revert to the home of his parents, and all that he had loved and prized of the connections and the habits of civilized life, yet he now hardly wished to resume those habits. Indeed, had such a resumption implied the abandoning his wife and child, and his venerable father-in- law, no consideration would ever have induced him to think of it. He had likewise, as Tisquantum said, on obtaining his consent to his marriage with Oriana, solemnly promised never to take her away from him while he lived; therefore, at present he entertained no intention of again rejoining his countrymen, and renouncing his Indian mode of life.

Still 'the voices of his home' were often ringing in his ear by day and by night; and the desire to know the fate of his beloved family, and once more to behold each fondly-cherished member of it, would sometimes come over him with an intensity that seemed to absorb every other feeling. Then he would devise plan after plan, by which he might hope to obtain some intelligence of the settlement, or convey to his relatives the knowledge of his safety. But never had he yet succeeded. Tisquantum had taken watchful care, for several years, to prevent any such communication being effected; and it was, as we have seen mainly with this object that he had absented himself from the rest of his tribe, and his own former place of abode.

He had led his warriors and their families far to the north, and there he had resided for several years; only returning occasionally to the south-western prairies for the hunting season, and again travelling northward when the buffalo and the elk were no longer abundant in the plains. In all these wanderings Henrich had rejoiced; and his whole soul had been elevated by such constant communion with the grandest works of nature--or rather, of nature's God. He had gazed on the stupendous cataract of Niagara, and listened to its thunders,[*] till he felt himself in the immediate presence of Deity in all its omnipotence.

[Footnote: O-ni-ga-rah, 'the Thunder of Waters,' is the Indian name for these magnificent falls.]

He had crossed the mighty rivers of America, that seemed to European eyes to be arms of the sea; and had passed in light and frail canoes over those vast lakes that are themselves like inland oceans. And, in the high latitudes to which the restless and apprehensive spirit of Tisquantum had led him, he had traveled over boundless fields of snow in the sledges of the diminutive Esquimaux, and lodged in their strange winter-dwellings of frozen snow, that look as if they were built of the purest alabaster, with windows of ice as clear as crystal. And marvelously beautiful those dwellings were in Henrich's eyes, as be passed along the many rooms, with their cold walls glittering with the lamp-light, or glowing from the reflection of the fire of pine branches, that burnt so brightly in the center on a hearth of stone. Well and warmly, too, had he slept on the bedsteads of snow, that these small northern men find so comfortable, when they have strewn them with a thick layer of pine boughs, and covered them with an abundant supply of deerskins. And then the lights of the north--the lovely Aurora, with its glowing hues of crimson and yellow and violet! When this beauteous phenomena was gleaming in the horizon, and shooting up its spires of colored light far into the deep blue sky, bow ardently did Henrich desire the presence of his sister--of his Edith who used to share his every feeling, and sympathize in all him love and reverence for the works of God! But in all those days and months and years that elapsed between the time when we left Henrich in the hunting-grounds of the west, and the time to which we have now carried him, Oriana had been a sister--yes, more than a sister-to him; and she had learnt to think