[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

It was through the lenity of MacDonald, in releasing
the bonds of his captive the moment he discovered
her arms were pinioned, that Alida had
succeeded in making her single attempt at escape,
which we have already seen was futile. The worthy
Scotchman was deeply chagrined at having in
any way participated in the business of the night,
which he deemed affected his character both as an
officer and as a gentleman; and now, while hurrying
toward the Indian station, he did not hesitate to
express his regret that the lady had not succeeded
in regaining the protection of her friends. Thayendanagea
seemed in no wise offended with the bluntness
of his language, as the major denounced in no
measured terms the Indian system of making war
upon women and children, answering only very dryly
that that was a question for the moralist, which he
would be happy to discuss with his friend when
they should be at leisure to talk over the whole
subject of war, with Sir John's chaplain to make a
third party in the discussion. “But, Major MacDonald,”
said he, “I could tell you that in regard to
the position of this young lady which entirely

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

prevents her case from being included in the question
you have raised.”

“You have already told me the considerations of
policy which prompted the act; but, Sachem, there
is but one policy which should ever govern gallant
men when the welfare of women is concerned. Our
humane civilization teaches us that war—”

“Is an honourable game, at which the noble and
the far-descended should play with the lavished
lives of their inferiors, the wail of whose desolated
kindred can never reach the ears of the upper
classes, to whom alone the prize of glory in any
event may fall; pardon my interruption, but that,
Major MacDonald, is the real purport of what you
would say. You would shudder at the bare thought
of one of England's high-born dames being torn from
her luxurious home to a prisoner's dungeon; and the
horror of her being tortured at the stake would
darken the recollection of the most brilliant successes
in war. But the wretched children, whom you
doom to grow up in poverty and contempt by making
them fatherless; the lacerated hearts of thousands
of widows, whose existence you protract by
your reluctant bounty, after rendering that existence
miserable; these are never remembered to cast a
shade over the tale of a victory. Call you this humanity,
which embraces but the welfare of a class
within its mercies? Call you this consideration for
woman, which regards the rank rather than the sex
of the sufferers? The sex? Great Spirit of the
universe! have I not read of your gallantry, your
tender mercies toward them in the storming of
towns and castles? I, an Indian, a savage, have
seen your own records, the white man's printed testimony
to these abominations of his race; but the
breath of life is not in the nostrils of him who has
seen a female insulted by her Iroquois captor.”

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

MacDonald listened to the tirade of the chieftain
without caring to contradict what he said; and, by
way of cutting short the discussion, and changing
the subject to one of a less abstract nature, he admitted
that if war were an evil, not the least summary
way of putting an end to it was by the Indian
mode of making all who were interested in its result
indiscriminate sharers in its horrors. “But I
have yet to learn, Sachem,” said he, “why the welfare
of this young lady is not involved in the question?”

Brant smiled grimly, and pointed to a litter of
boughs carried by a couple of Indians, whereon reposed
the form of Alida, wrapped in his own mantle.
“Could a father,” he said, “care more gently
for his own daughter than do I for the Lady Alida?
Could that feeble old man, with his rash, hot-headed
son, have given her the safe shelter she may
find, in times like these, beneath the roof of Thayendanagea?
The devil is unchained, I tell ye, Major
MacDonald, and there are wild men enough
beside Indians to do his bidding in these parts.”

“Why,” said MacDonald, in a tone of surprise
and pleasure, “why did you not hint this to me
before? You spoke but of taking the lady as an
hostage! Had I thought that so generous a concern
prompted—”

“Nay, speak not of generosity. Perhaps, after
all—though her safety is best secured by the act—it
was but as an hostage that I did seize my captive.
But I mean her as an hostage to restrain far more
dangerous spirits than the mad-cap De Roos, or the
dreaming enthusiast Greyslaer. There are men—
men bearing the commission of the king, who bring
the ferocious nature of outlaws to our cause; men
whom you and I would scorn to act with, save in a
cause so holy; and in the mad dance of devilish

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

passions which the convulsion of the times will let loose,
they must be restrained by other powers than those
of official authority. There is one man who—but
this is not the time to speak of him; let us urge onward
to our destination.”

That time never came with Brant, who seemed
to have forgotten the promised solution of his dark
and mysterious language when they arrived at the
Indian station; nor did MacDonald, who soon after
departed with an escort through the woods to Johnstown,
understand, till long afterward, the bearing of
what the chieftain said upon events disclosed in the
sequel; and which may be best unfolded in the
regular course of our story, which recurs again to
the scene of our last chapter.

It was about the hour of midnight that the younger
De Roos, taking Balt to guide him upon the Indian
track, quietly withdrew to the hillside with his
followers; where, after some ten minutes' impatient
waiting for Greyslaer, they took up their line of
march through the forest without him.

Greyslaer, in the mean time, rising from the pallet
whereon he had snatched a brief repose, descended
the staircase, and already had his hand on
the outer door, when a deep moaning in the room
adjacent to the passage arrested his attention. A
feeble light streaming through an aperture showed
that the door was ajar, and, with cautious and subdued
steps, he hesitated not to enter.

It was the chamber of the dead.

The flickering taper upon the hearth revealed the
figure of an old woman in a gray cloak, whose attenuated
and sallow features looked still more ghastly
from the scarlet hood which was thrown back
from her forehead and rested upon her shoulders.
She sat upon a low wicker chair, with one of her
feet upon a footstool, and the other with the toe

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

stiffly upturned, and the heel resting on the floor,
thrust out so far beyond her dress that its shrivelled
proportions showed like the stark limb of a skeleton.
Her cheek supported upon her bony fingers, with
the closed lids of her sunken eyes, showed that her
vigil had been badly kept; and Greyslaer, pained at
the thought that the remains of the gentle Tyntie
should be left to such a watcher, turned from the
forlorn old crone to the coffin in which the body had
been laid.

It was empty. But, before he could rally his
thoughts to account for a circumstance so astounding,
the moaning sounds which had first drawn him
to the chamber again caught his ear. He turned,
and beheld a sight both piteous and awful.

In a shadowy corner of the room, removed as far
as possible from the slumbering guardian of the
dead, sat the venerable father of the murdered
maiden, folding her stiffened corpse in his arms,
and pressing it to his bosom with a tenderness as
passionate as if he thought that the pulses of parental
affection which beat within could rekindle
those of life in his departed daughter. The shroud,
with its formal drapery, still veiled the lineaments
of her clay-cold form; but the napkin that shielded
her throat, and the fillet or muslin band that covered
the gash in her forehead, while keeping the long
locks smoothly parted beneath it, had escaped from
their place; and the golden tresses, floating loose,
mingled with the gray hair of the old man, as he
madly kissed the frightful wound through which her
gentle spirit had been dismissed to heaven.

The agonized parent, who had thus crept, in the
dead of the night, to hold this awful communion with
his child, seemed wholly unconscious of the presence
of Greyslaer, who would fain have slunk away
in silence as one who, by unwitting intrusion,

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

profaned some hallowed mystery; but his power of volition
seemed taken away, and he still continued to
stand, in spite of himself, as it were, with eyes riveted
upon the heart rending spectacle. At length
the mute anguish of the old man found vent in words.
The colour went and came strangely over his ashen
countenance; while his features writhed as if it were
difficult for them to assume the new expression of
malevolent and vindictive feeling they had now for
the first time to wear.

“Brant, cruel Brant,” cried the wretched parent,
“the God—the Christian's God, whom I aided in
teaching thee to worship, may forgive thee this, but
I—I never can. A parent's curse—the curse of a
bereaved and stricken heart, be, oh God, upon—” A
burst of sobs, that for a moment threatened to suffocate
him, cut short the blasphemous appeal; but
history, in the tragic fate of Brant's own family, has
shown how deeply the malediction wrought in after
years; and the old man, like one startled by a spell
himself had evoked, seemed, with the prophetic eye
of approaching dissolution, to foresee the working
of his curse. He shivered as with a grave-chill;
and, dropping now upon his knees, with the lifeless
face of his daughter upturned upon his bosom,
mutely pleading toward heaven, he essayed in
prayer to beseech a pardon and recall his words.
But his quivering lips refused to syllable a sound.
A sudden and subtile agony seemed on the instant
to travel through his limbs and rack his aged frame;
and then, while unresistingly permitting Greyslaer
to take the body from his arms, he sank unconscious
upon the floor.

Calling the old woman to his aid, Greyslaer, with
the tender care of a mother, lifting the fragile form
of her child in which life still feebly hovers, again
consigned the body to its formal receptacle; and,

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

while the crone busied herself in readjusting the
grave-clothes of the maiden, he turned to raise her
wretched father from the ground.

But the sorrows of the old man had ceased for
ever; the thread of his feeble existence, protracted
only, as it seemed, beyond the usual length, to be
interwoven at the last with more than usual misery,
had snapped beneath the tension of an agonized
spirit. He had been called away—after a long life
of blameless benevolence and Christian meekness,
he had been mysteriously called away in a moment
of contumacy toward Heaven. He departed, indeed,
with a prayer upon his lips, but his last-uttered
words were those of imprecation. He had been
called, though, by a God of mercy!

It was with a sad heart that Greyslaer, after
climbing the hills to strike the trail of his friends,
succeeded at last in overtaking them after an hour's
rapid walk through the forest; nor, for a long time,
could he find the heart to break to Derrick de Roos
the mournful event which he had just witnessed.
The blow was better received than he had anticipated.
The grief of the warm-hearted but mercurial
young man was indeed, in the first instance, passionate
to a degree that was outrageous; but, as it
found an immediate outlet in words—for, in the
madness of his mood, he poured out such a torrent
of curses upon Brant, the author of his sorrows, as
to shock the better-disciplined mind of his friend—
the first paroxysm soon passed over. When this
violent burst of emotion had had its way, he seemed,
by a versatility of feeling not uncommon in persons
of his keen but transient susceptibility to the
impression of the moment, to be almost reconciled
to the event. And his words characteristically betrayed
this condition of his mind. He stood a few
minutes, distracted between the natural wish to

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

return and aid in the last obsequies to his father, and
an eager impatience to hurry on to the rescue of his
sister, and, at the same time, strike instant vengeance
upon the desolator of his household.

“Yes, I will proceed,” cried he, at last; “and
now Alida—the only living object that remains for
my care—must at once be got out of the clutches
of these hell-hounds. Perhaps, too, after all, my
dear Max, it is better that the old man departed as
he did. There will be wild work doing in the valley
for years to come; and the kind heart of my father
already bled for the distracted state of the country,
as he used to pray that he might never live to
witness the scenes of havoc and of bloodshed that
must soon ensue. Strange! and I used to think it
but an old man's dreaming. Yes, yes, Greyslaer, it
was better that he should be removed at the first
outbreak of the storm, than that those gray hairs
should be left to be still farther bleached by its peltings,
and bowed down to the grave at last, without
his ever beholding the bright days to come that you
and I may yet witness.”

And, with the wonted buoyancy of his gay and not
wholly unselfish nature, refusing thus to entertain a
grief where regret was unavailing—with the sanguine
hopes of Youth gilding thus quickly the clouds of a
new-sprung sorrow, the young man seemed to dismiss
the subject for the present, whatever may have
been his after-emotions. Constitutionally reckless
and unreflecting as he was, it would be doing injustice
to De Roos, however, to say that his step was
as buoyant as before, though he again strode stoutly
forward with his comrades.