"Again the magnates of the church sat in judgment upon her. A ship lay on the coast, a battered old vessel bound for Bermuda. This brave woman could not be trusted in the country--the ship would bear her and her children into slavery. The wife and children of a king were taken from the broad forest, with its fresh winds and sumptuous leafiness, and condemned to herd with negroes and slaves under a tropic sun. That night, no one could ever tell how, the wife of Philip escaped from her captors, and fled with her youngest child, a little girl scarcely yet three years old. That child inherited its mother's beauty, its father's lofty pride, and the solemn obligations of Anna Hutchinson's curse." Again Abigail felt the cold chills creeping over her. "Ah me!" she muttered, "that terrible inheritance--better that the child had died." "Better that the child had died than avenge such wrongs--a grandmother's butchery, a father's murder, stripes and slavery for the mother, chains, hard labor, brutal blows for the young boy--better that she had died! Wretched girl, unsay these words!" The anger in his face was terrible, his hand sprung upwards as if to smite her. She shrunk away into the shadow of the pine, thinking thus to escape his fiery glances. "Step into the light again, that your face may unsay the cowardly words of your tongue!" "I dare not--you terrify me. Why tell this horrible story here? I am young, helpless, afraid sometimes, and talk like this takes away my strength. I cannot think of this dying woman's curse without dread. The judgment of God must follow it, and the helpless child, with whom its power was left--but perhaps she died." "And if she had, was not the son left, the Bermuda slave, with King Philip's blood burning beneath the lash, to remind him of the legacy of hate left against her people by his martyred ancestress?" "It was an evil inheritance from a woman who wrought much trouble in the church, though the atonement was enough to wring one's heart. This Anna Hutchinson, who died under the tomahawk, was a heretic--a free thinker, who would not forgive her enemies as Christ did, but died hurling curses back upon the people who perhaps only sought to win her once more to the true faith." "Hold!" shouted the chief, seizing her by the arm and dragging her into the moonlight; "hold, before the word withers your tongue--Anna Hutchinson was your _grandmother_." Abigail Williams cried out like a doe when the arrow pierces it. "The woman who sleeps there is her eldest daughter, the wife of King Philip!" "And I--I," whispered the poor creature--writhing as if in pain. "You are the child." "The child to whom the power of her curse descends! oh, my God, have mercy--have mercy!" "Mahaska." "I hear, oh heavens, I feel that the name was mine!" "Mahaska, listen: The blood of that brave woman--of that most kingly of kings--both betrayed, both murdered--beats in our veins."