University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

The lightning streamed athwart the heavens
in quick and vivid flashes. One peal of thunder
after another echoed from cliff to cliff, while a
driving storm of rain, wind and hail, made the
face of nature black and dismal. There was something
frightfully congenial in this uproar of the
contending elements with the storm raging in Bacon's
heart, as he rushed from the scene of the
catastrophe we have just witnessed. The darkness
which succeeded the lurid and sulphureous
flashes was not more complete and unfathomable
than the black despair of his own soul.
These vivid contrasts of light and gloom were
the only stimulants of which he was susceptible,
and they were welcomed as the light of his path!
By their guidance he wildly rushed to his stable,
saddled, led forth, and mounted his noble charger,
his own head still uncovered. For once the gallant

animal felt himself uncontrolled master of his
movements, fleet as the wind his nimble heels
measured the narrow limits of the island. A sudden
glare of intense light served for an instant to
reveal both to horse and rider that they stood upon
the brink of the river, and a single indication of the
rider's will was followed by a plunge into the
troubled waves. Nobly and majestically he rose
and sank with the swelling surges. His master
sat erect in the saddle and felt his benumbed faculties
revived, as he communed with the storm.
The raging elements appeared to sympathize with
the tumult of his own bosom. He laughed in horrid
unison with the gambols of the lightning, and
yelled with savage delight as the muttering thunder
rolled over his head.

There is a sublime stimulus in despair. Bacon
felt its power; he was conscious that one of the
first laws of our organization, (self-preservation,)
was suddenly dead within him.

The ballast of the frail vessel was thrown overboard,
and the sails were spread to the gathering
storm with reckless desperation. Compass and
rudder were alike abandoned and despised—they
were for the use of those who had hopes and fears.
For himself he spread his sails and steered his
course with the very spirit of the storm itself. Nature
in her wildest moods has no terrors for those
who have nothing to lose or win; no terrors for
them who laugh and play with the very elements
of her destruction; they are wildly, madly independent.

It is the sublimity of the maniac! Nevertheless
there is a fascination in his reckless steps
as he threads the narrow and fearful windings of
the precipice, or carelessly buffets the waves of
the raging waters. There are other sensations of
a high and lofty character in this disjointed state
of the faculties. The very ease and rapidity with
which ordinary dangers are surmounted, serves to
keep up the delusion, and were it not for the irresponsible
condition of the mind, there would doubtless
be impiety in its developments. Such were Bacon's
sensations as he wildly stemmed the torrent.
He imagined that he was absolved from the ordinary
responsibilities and hazards of humanity! and
to his excited fancy, it seemed as though petty
fears and grovelling cautions were all that lay between
humanity and the superior creations of the
universe! that power also came with this absolution
from the hopes, fears and penalties of man's
low estate. In imagination “he rode upon the
storm and managed the whirlwind.” The monsters
of the deep were his playmates, the ill-omened
birds of the night his fellows. The wolves
howled in dreadful concord with the morbid efforts
of his preternaturally distorted faculties, as
the noble and panting animal first struck the shore
with his forefeet.

Emerging from the water, he stroked down the
dripping mane with a wild and melancholy affection.
The very consciousness of such a feeling
yet remaining in his soul, which he dared indulge,

produced for the moment a dangerous and kindred
train of emotions. These as before led him upon
forbidden ground, and again the wild tumult of
his soul revived. Striking his heels into the animal's
flanks, and bending upon his neck, he urged
him over the ground at a pace in unison with the
impetuosity of his own feelings.

The fire and gravel flew from his heels, as he
bounded through the trackless forests of the unsubdued
wilderness. The frightened birds of night,
and beasts of prey, started in affright, wild at the appearance
upon the scene of one darker and wilder
than themselves. The very reptiles of the earth
shrunk to their hiding places, as the wild horseman
and his steed invaded their prescriptive dominions.

Mrs. Fairfax and her daughter, according to
the commands of Sir William Berkley, were conveyed
to his mansion. To them all places were
now alike. The mother after a long and death-like
trance, revived to a breathing and physical existence;
but her mind was overrun with horrors.
Reason was dethroned, and her lips gave utterance
to the wildest fantasies. Events with which,
and persons with whom, none of those about her
were conversant, were alluded to in all the incoherency
and unbridled impetuosity of the maniac.
The depletion and anodynes of the physician were
administered in vain. The ravages upon the seat
of nervous power had rendered the ordinary remedies
to the more distant chords of communication
utterly powerless. From a mild, bland, feeble and

sickly state of melancholy, she was suddenly transformed
into a frenzied lunatic. Her muscular
power seemed to have received multiplied accessions
of strength. Yet there was “a method in her
madness”—the same names and scenes frequently
recurred in her raving paroxysms. That of
Charles was reiterated through the wild intonations
of delusion; sometimes madly and revengefully,
but more frequently in sorrow.

There was occasionally a moving and touching pathos
in these latter demonstrations—tearless it is
true, but thrilling and electrifying in the subdued
whisper in which they were sometimes uttered. A
flood of pent up emotions was poured forth with
a thrilling eloquence which had their origin in the
foundations of the soul. Scenes of days long past,
were revived with a graphic and affecting power,
which imagination cannot give if their mysterious
source and receptacle be not previously and
abundantly stored with the richest treasures of the
female heart and mind.

Because the by-standers do not happen to be in
possession of all the previous history of the sufferer,
so as to put together these melancholy and
broken relics, they are generally supposed to be
the creations of a distempered fancy.

So it was with Mrs. Fairfax; her detached reminiscences
fell upon the dull and uninstructed
ears of her attendants as the wildest hallucinations
of the brain, yet there was more connexion in these

flights than they imagined. They supposed that
she thought herself conversing in her most subdued
and touching moments with young Dudley,
merely because his name was frequently pronounced,
and that he happened to be present at the disastrous
ceremony, which resulted so dreadfully to
all parties.

Among all these, Virginia's was the hardest lot
—so delicately and exquisitely organized, so gentle—so
susceptible—so full of enthusiasm—so rich
in innocence and hope, and all so suddenly prostrated.
Bacon was nerved with the wild yet exalted
heroism of manhood in despair. Her mother
was wrapt in a blessed oblivion of the present,
but she was sensitively and exquisitely alive to the
past, present and future. One fainting paroxysm
succeeded to another in frightful rapidity, for hours
after she was removed to her uncle's house.

The painful intervals were filled up with a concentration
of wretched reflections, which none but
a finely organized and cultivated female mind
could conceive or endure. No proper conception
of these can be conveyed in language, unless the
reader will suffer his imagination to grasp her
whole condition at once.—Beginning at the first
inception of the unsuspected passion for the noble
youth who is the hero of our tale—in her earliest
infancy; and afterwards following her as it matured
and strengthened by the reflections of riper
years.—Every faculty, both perceptive and intellectual,

had combined to impress his image in the
most indelible colours upon her heart. He had
himself ripened these very faculties into maturity
by the most assiduous culture, and won her esteem
by the most touching, delicate, and respectful attentions.

All these things in detail were painfully revolved
in her mind. Every landscape, every book,
every subject, reminded her most forcibly of him
whom it was now criminal to think of. Her's
was the sorrow that no sympathy could soften, no
friendship alleviate. The sight of her intimate
and confidential friend drove her mad, for her
presence instantly revived the horrid recollections
of the chapel. Long after the clouds had cleared
away, the thunder still roared in her ears. The
sudden slamming of a door sounded to her nervous
irritability, like the report of a cannon. Her own
shadow conjured up horrible images. The most
violent and the most acute paroxysms of the human
organization, however, have a tendency to
wear themselves out, when left uninterruptedly to
their own action. Such was necessarily, in some
measure, the case with Virginia; her mother's
more alarming condition calling so much more
loudly for attention, and Wyanokee having fled,
and Harriet's presence proving so evidently hurtful,
she was consequently left with a single sable
domestic. Essentially she was in profound solitude;
and after the first paroxysms which we have
described, her mind naturally and irresistibly fell

into a train of retrospective thought. Startling
and horrifying they certainly were at first, but
still the mind clung to them. Many of the circumstances
of the late disastrous meeting were
to her as yet unexplained. To these she clung as
to the last remnants of hope; they were the straws
at which she grasped with the desperation of the
drowning wretch. She had at first received her
mother's tacit acknowledgment of the mysterious
stranger's statement, or rather the effect produced
by that statement as irresistible confirmation of
its truth. But now she doubted the propriety of
her hasty conviction. She marvelled at the effect
produced upon her mother—yet there were other
means of accounting for it. Would she not have
exhibited a like sensibility, had a like statement
been made, however false, under such circumstances?—did
she not deny it, positively deny it
at the moment? Such was the train of reasoning
by which her mind began to reassure itself; and
it must be recollected that she had never heard
more of her mother's history, than that she was a
childless widow when her father married her.
Sufficient was left however of first impressions to
render her situation one of intense suffering and
suspense. She dared not ask for Bacon, yet a
restless and gnawing anxiety possessed her, to
know whether he acknowledged the truth of the
dreadful tale without a murmur, and without investigation.
But her physical organization could
not keep pace with the ever elastic mind; her gentle
frame gave sensible evidence that the late violent
shocks had made sad inroads upon her system. One
chill was succeeded by another, until they were in
their turn followed by a burning fever. In this condition
she fell again into the hands of the physician,
and all mental distress was soon lost in the paramount
demands of the suffering body.

Toward the hour of midnight, the storm subsided.
Fragments of the black curtain which had
hung over the face of the heavens, shot up from
the eastern horizon in stupendous blue masses,
every now and then illuminated to their summits
with the reflection of the raging elements beyond.
The violence of the conflict in Bacon's breast had
also subsided. He rode along the banks of the
Chickahominy, his charger dripping with wet and
panting with the exhaustion of fatigue. The bridle
hung loose upon his neck, and his rider bent over
his mane like a worn-out soldier. His own locks
had unbent their stubborn curls to the driving
storm, and hung about his neck in drooping masses.
His silken hose were spattered with mud,
and his gay bridal dress hung about his person in
lank and dripping folds. His horse had for some
time followed the bent of his own humour, and
was now leading his master in the neighbourhood
of human habitations. The boughs of the tall
gloomy pines were fantastically illuminated with
broad masses of light, which ever and anon burst
from the smouldering remnants of a huge pine log
fire. Its immediate precincts were surrounded by

some fifty or more round matted huts, converging
toward the summit like a gothic steeple.
Around the fire, and under a rude shelter, lay
some hundred warriors, wrapped in profound
slumber while one of their tribe stood sentinel
over the camp.

When Bacon had approached within a short
distance of this picturesque group, the sentinel
sprung upon his feet, and uttered a shrill warwhoop.
The horse stood still, erected his neck
and pricked up his ears, while his master folded
his arms upon his breast and calmly surveyed the
scene. Those warriors who slept under the sheds
near the fire, assumed the erect attitude with a
simultaneous movement, joining in the wild chorus
of the sentinel's yell as they arose.

Hundreds of men, women, and children poured
from the surrounding huts,—most of the grown
males, with their faces painted in blue and red
stripes, their heads shaved close to the cranium,
except a tuft of hair upon the crown, and all armed
in readiness for battle. Bacon assumed the
command of his horse and rode into the very centre
of this wild congregation,—the fore hoofs resting
upon the spent embers of the fire.

He was greeted with another yell, after which
the savages stood back and viewed his strange and
untimely appearance with wonder not unmixed
with awe. His bridle again fell from his hand,
and his arms were crossed upon his breast. His
countenance was wild and haggard, and a flash of

maniacal enthusiasm shot athwart his pale features.
His dress under present circumstances was fantastical
in the extreme.

A grim old warrior with savage aspect after staring
some time intensely at the intruder, was suddenly
struck with something in his appearance,
and stepping out a few paces from the mass of his
companions began to address them in his own language,
now and then pointing to the horseman, and
using the most violent gesticulations. At another
time the youth would have been not a little alarmed
at certain significant signs which the speaker
used when pointing to himself. These consisted
in twirling his war club round and round, as if he
was engaged in the most deadly conflict. Then
he placed his hand to the side of his head and bent
it near the earth as if about to prostrate himself,
and finally pointing to Bacon. When he had done
this, several of the crowd closed in toward his
horse, and seemed intensely to examine the lineaments
of his countenance. Having satisfied themselves,
they set up a simultaneous yell of savage
delight. He was quickly drawn from the saddle,
his hands tied behind him, and then placed
in the centre of the assembled throng.

Their savage orgies now commenced; a procession
of all the grown males moved in a circle of
some fifty feet in diameter round his person.
Several of the number beat upon rude drums, formed
of large calabashes with raw hides stretched
tight and dried over the mouths; while others

dexterously rattled dried bones and shuffled with
their feet to their own music. Others chanted
forth a monotonous death song; the whole forming
the rudest, wildest, and most savage spectacle
imaginable.

Bacon himself stood an unmoved spectator of all
these barbarous ceremonies. He felt a desperate
and reckless indifference to what might befall him.
Human endurance had been stretched to its utmost
verge, and he felt within him a longing desire to
end the vain struggle in the sleep of death. To
one like him, who had in the last few hours endured
the mental tortures of a hundred deaths, their
savage cruelties had no terrors. A faint hope indeed
may have crossed his mind, that some warrior
more impetuous than his comrades, might
sink his tomahawk deep into his brain in summary
vengeance for the death of their chief. But they
better understood the delights of vengeance. After
performing their rude war-dance for some time,
they commenced the more immediate preparations
for the final tragedy. His hands were loosed, his
person stripped and tied to a stake, while some
dozen youths of both sexes busied themselves in
splitting the rich pine knots into minute pins.
These being completed, a circular pile of finely
cleft pieces of the same material was built around
his body, just near enough for the fire to convey
its tortures by slow degrees without too suddenly
ending their victim. A deafening whoop from
old and young announced the commencement of

the ceremony. Each distinguished warrior present
had the privilege of inserting a given number
of splinters into his flesh. The grim old savage
who had first identified Bacon as the slayer of
their chief, stepped forward and commenced the
operation. He thrust in the tearing torments with
a ferocious delight, not a little enhanced by the
physical convulsive movements of his victim at
every new insertion. Worn out nature however
could not endure the uninterrupted completion of
the process, and the victim swooned away.

His body hung by the thongs which had bound
his waist and hands to the stake, his head drooping
forward as if the spirit had already taken its
flight. He was immediately let down and the
tenderest care observed to resuscitate him, in order
that they might not be cheated of their full revenge.
His head and throat were bathed in cold
water and his parched lips moistened through the
medium of a gourd. At length he revived, and
strange as it may appear, to a keener consciousness
of his situation than he had felt since he left the
church. All the wild horrors of his fate stared
him in the face. The savages screamed with delight
at his returning animation. Copious drafts of
water were administered as he called for them.
The most intense pain was already experienced
from the festering wounds around each of the
wooden daggers driven into his flesh. Again he
prayed that some of them might instantaneously
reach his heart, but his prayer was not destined to

be granted. He was again fastened to the stake,
and the second in dignity and authority proceeded
to perform his share of the brutal exhibition. At
this moment a piercing scream rent the air, and all
tongues were mute, all hands suspended.

The sound proceeded from the extreme right of
the encampment. Here a larger hut than the rest
stood in solitary dignity apart from the others, like
an officer's marqueé in a military encampment. In
a few moments the rude door was thrust aside and
an Indian female of exquisite proportions rushed
to the scene of butchery, and threw herself between
the half immolated victim and his bloodthirsty
tormentors. Upon her head she wore a
rude crown, composed of a wampum belt tightly
encircling her brows, and surmounted by a circlet
of the plumes of the kingfisher, facing outwards
at the top. Around her waist was belted a short
frock of dressed deer-skin, which fell in folds
about her knees, and was ornamented around the
fringed border with beads and wampum. Over
her left shoulder and bust she gracefully wore a
variegated skin dressed with the hair facing externally;
from this her right arm extended, bare to
the shoulder, save a single clasp at the wrist; and
she carried in her hand a long javelin mounted at
the end with a white crystal. The remaining parts
of her figure exhibited their beautiful proportions
neatly fitted with a pair of buck-skin leggins, extended
and fringed on the seam with porcupine
quills, copper and glass ornaments. Similar de

corations were visible on her exquisitely proportioned
feet and ankles. Thrusting her javelin in
the ground with energy, and proudly raising her
head, she cast a withering glance of scorn and indignation
upon the perpetrators of the cruelty.
Her address, translated into English, was to the following
purport: “Is it for this,” and she pointed
to Bacon's bleeding wounds, “that I have been invested
with the authority of my sires? Was it to
witness the perpetration of these cruelties that I
have been almost dragged from the house of my
pale faced friends? Scarcely has the fire burned out
which was kindled to celebrate my arrival among
you, before it is rekindled to sacrifice in its flames
him who redeemed me from captivity. Is this the
return which Chickahominies make for past favours?
If so, I pray you to tear from my person
these emblems of my authority among you.”

She was immediately answered by the old warrior
who had commenced the tortures; “Did not
the [1] long knife slay the chief of our nation?”

He was answered by a yell of savage delight
from all the warriors present. Wyanokee (for it
was she, as the reader has no doubt already surmised)
continued, “Ay, he did slay King Fisher
and his son—but were they not unjustly attempting
to take away the property of the pale faces?
and did they not commit the deed against their
solemn promise and treaty, and after they had

smoked the pipe of peace? For shame, warriors
and men—would ye turn squaws, and murder a
brave and noble youth because he had fought for
his own people and for the preservation of his own
life?”

Her harangue was not received with the submission
and respect which she expected—many
murmured at her defence, and claimed the death of
the captive as a prescriptive right and an act of
retributive justice. She advanced to cut the cords
which bound the prisoner, but twenty more powerful
arms instantly arrested her movement. Tomahawks
were raised in frightful array, while deep and
loud murmurs of discontent, and demands for vengeance
rent the air. She placed herself before the
captive, and elevating her person to its utmost
height, and extending her hands before him as a protection,
she cried, “Strike your tomahawks here,
into the daughter of your chief, of him who led you
on to battles and to victory, but harm not the defenceless
stranger.” The principal warriors held
a consultation as to the fate of the prisoner. It was
of but short duration, there being few dissenting
voices to the proposition of the old savage, already
mentioned as principal spokesman of the party.
They soon returned and announced to their new
queen that the council of the nation had decreed
the prisoner's death. “Never, never!” exclaimed
the impassioned maiden, “unless you first
cleave off these hands with which I will protect
him from your fury. Ha!” she cried, as a

sudden thought seemed to strike her; “there is
one plan of redemption by your own laws. I will
be his wife!” A deep blush suffused her cheeks
as she forced the reluctant announcement from her
lips. An expression of sadness and disappointment
soon spread itself over the countenances of
the revengeful warriors, for they knew that she
had spoken the truth. Another council was immediately
held; at which it was determined that
their youthful queen, might according to the usages
of the nation, take the captive for her husband, in
the place of her kinsman who was slain. When
this was proclaimed, Wyanokee slowly and doubtingly
turned her eyes upon Bacon to see whether
the proposition met a willing response in his breast.
A single glance sufficed to convince her that it did
not. Instantly, however, recovering her self-possession,
she cut the cords and led him to her hut,
where after having been reinvested with the sad
remnants of his bridal finery, we must leave him
for the night.