EXTRACTS FROM THE LETTERS OF NORMAN WESTFALL
Reluctantly, Diane opened the letters of long ago and read them:
Grant and I have had wild sport killing alligators with the Seminoles.
A wild, dark, unexplored country, Ann, these Florida Everglades! How I
wish you were with us! Tyson had an Indian guide, evoked somewhere
from the wild by smoke signals, waiting for us. We traversed miles and
miles of savage, uninhabitable marsh before at last we came to the
isolated Indian camp. Small wonder the Seminole is still unconquered.
It is a world here for wild men. I'll write as I feel inclined and
bunch the letters when there is an Indian going out to the fringe of
civilization.
We hunt the 'gators by night in cypress canoes. Grant sat in the bow
of our boat to-night with a bull's-eye lantern in his cap. The fan of
it over the silent, black water, the eyes of the 'gators blazing in the
dark, these cool, bronze, turbaned devils with axes to sever the spinal
cord and rifles to shatter the skull--it's a wild and thrilling scene.
I'm sorry Carl was not so well. Now that Dad is kinder to the little
chap, we could have left him at St. Augustine if he'd been well enough
to make the trip. It bothers me that you're not along. It's my first
time without you, and you're a better shot than Grant and more
dependable in mood. I can't make out what's come over him of late.
He's so moody and reckless that the Indians think he's a devil. He's
more prone to wild whims than ever. We've shot wild turkey and bear
but I like the 'gator sport the best.
There's a curious white man here who's lived a good part of his life
with the tribe. He's a Spaniard, a dark-skinned, bitter, morose sort
of chap--really a Minorcan--whose Indian wife is dead. He has a
daughter, a girl of twenty or so whom the Seminoles call Nan-ces-o-wee.
He calls her simply Nanca. She speaks Spanish fluently. The morose
old Spaniard has taught her a fund of curious things. Her heavy hair,
black as a storm-cloud, falls to her knees. Grant says her wonderful
eyes remind him somehow of midnight water. Her eyebrows have the
expressive arch of the Seminole. Her color is dark and very rich, but
it's more the coloring of the Spanish father than the Seminole mother.
Altogether, she's more Spanish than Indian, I take it, though she's a
tantalizing combination of each in instinct. Her grace is wild and
Indian--and she walks lightly and softly like a doe. Ann, her face
haunts me.
Young as she is, this Nanca of whom I have written so much to you, has,
they tell me, had a most romantic history. With her beauty it was of
course, inevitable. Men are fools. At eighteen, urged into proud
revolt against her Seminole suitors by her father, who for all his
singular way of life can not forget his white heritage, she married a
young foreigner who came into the Glades hunting. He seems to have
been utterly without ties and decided to live with the Indians in the
manner of the Spaniard. A year or so later, a young artist imitator of
Catlin's made his way to the Seminole village with a guide. He had
been traveling about among the Indians of the reservations painting
Indian types, and had heard of this old turbaned tribe buried in the
Everglades. Nanca's beauty must have driven him quite mad, I think.
At any rate he wooed and won. Nanca begged the young foreigner to
divorce her, which he did. The Seminole divorce custom is lenient when
the marriage is childless. The artist, I fancy, was merely a wild,
reckless, inconstant sort of chap who did not regard the simple
Seminole marriage tie as binding. After the birth of his daughter, a
tiny little elf whom Nanca has named "Red-winged Blackbird," he tried
to run away, and the Indians killed him.
Red-winged Blackbird! Keela then was the child of the artist!
The old Spaniard in his gruff and haughty way has been kind to Grant
and me. He's not well--some obscure cardiac trouble from which he
suffers at times most horribly. He has confided to me a singular
secret. The young foreigner who divorced Nanca is the crown prince of
some obscure little mountain kingdom called Houdania. His name is
Theodomir. He had wild revolutionary notions, hated royalty and fled
at the death of his father. But America and its boasted liberty had
cankers and inequalities too, and heartsick, Theodomir roamed about
until at length on a hunting trip he came into the village of the
Seminoles. Here was the communistic organization of which this
aristocratic young socialist had dreamed--tribal ownership of lands,
coöperative equality of men and women--no jails, no poor-houses, no
bolts or bars or locks--honorable old age and perfect moral order
without law. What wonder that he lingered? Now that he is divorced
from Nanca he wanders about from tribe to tribe. I'd like to see him.
* * * * * *
Ann, I must write the truth. The face of this Spanish girl haunts me
day and night. There is a madness in my blood. I wish you were here!
I am tormented by terrible doubts and misgivings. If Dad were not so
intolerant!
* * * * * *
Nanca has fled from the Indian village with Grant and me. Oh, Ann, it
had to come! I lost my head. The old Spaniard died three days ago.
That was the cause of it. Nanca's grief was wild and terrible. Her
wailing dirge was all Indian, yet immediately she cried out that the
Indian way of life for her was impossible without her father. She
begged me to take her away. And yet--Oh, Ann, Ann! How could I take
that other man's child? We left her outside the old chief's wigwam.
Much as I have scoffed at marriage, I have married Nanca. Grant
insisted. He was a little bitter. I do not know what makes him so.
I have seen Dad. We quarreled bitterly. Agatha was there with him. I
can hardly write what followed. By some God-forsaken twist of Fate, a
jealous, sullen-eyed young Indian who had loved Nanca and had been
spurned by her father, followed us relentlessly from the Glades to St.
Augustine. He told Dad that Nanca had not been married to the
artist--that she was a mother and not a wife--and Dad believed it. I
told him patiently enough that there is no ceremony among the
Seminoles--that the man goes forth to the home of the girl at the
setting of the sun, and that he is then as legally her husband as if
all the courts in Christendom had tied the knot. Dad can not see it.
I shall be in New York in two weeks. Nanca and I are going to Spain.
I can not forget Dad's white, horror-struck face nor what he said. He
is bigoted and unjust. God help me, I hope that I may never set eyes
upon him again!
* * * * * *
We have been very happy here in Spain. I have run across a wonderful
old room in a Spanish castle. Ceiling, doors, fireplace, paintings,
table, chairs and lanterns, I am transplanting. What a setting for
Nanca!
We are sailing for home. Nanca is not so well as I could hope. She
grieves, I think, for the little girl in Florida. There are times when
I am bitterly jealous of those two other men.
There was a lapse of weeks in the letters. Then came a long one from
New York.
Grant came that night just after you had gone. He has been with me a
week. His notions are more erratic than ever. For instance, last
night, while we were smoking, I told him the story of Prince Theodomir.
He was greatly interested.
"What a chance!" said he softly. "What a chance, Norman, for wild
commotion in your ridiculous little court. I've been there. It's a
kingdom of crazy patriots who grant freedom of marital choice to their
princes to freshen and strengthen the royal blood; and they boast an
ancient line of queens wiser than Catherine of Russia. A hidden paper
purporting to be a deathbed statement of Prince Theodomir's--this
little daughter of Nanca and the artist--and, Lord! what complications
we could have immediately. How easily she might have been the child of
Theodomir and a princess!"
And sitting there by the table, Ann, he drew up an ingenious document
couched in the stilted English of a foreigner. Like most of Grant's
notions, it was infernally clever. It suggested that my marriage to
Nanca had been childless and that we had brought a child--the daughter
of Theodomir and Nanca--away from the Indian village and had reared her
with my name. Then he showed me with a laugh where three conflicting
meanings might be read from the stilted phrasing and eccentric
punctuation.
"Drop that, old man," said he, "into your chauvinistic little Punch and
Judy court along with the name of the missing Theodomir and watch the
blaze!"
After all, I do not think we will stay here in New York. Nanca is not
at all well. She longs for trees and the open country. We are coming
up to the lodge.
* * * * * *
I'm glad Dad sent for you. I think he is growing fonder of Carl,
though of course his prejudices will probably always flash out now and
then. . . . He's fond of us both, Ann, for all he raves so. No word
of Grant since that night of which you told me. . . . I am sorry.
* * * * * *
You tell me Grant has written to you. Tell him when you write--to
write to me. I miss him.
* * * * * *
Grant has sent me a giant pair of candlesticks from Spain. They are
six feet tall, of age-old wood and Spanish carving. He begs that they
may stand in the Spanish room and makes some incoherent reference to
you in connection with them, out of which I can't for the life of me
extract a grain of sense. If you could have cared for him a little,
Ann!
* * * * * *
I will not take this thing that fate has whipped into my face with a
scornful jeer. Nanca is dead! Her life went out with the life she
gave my daughter. Oh, Ann, Ann, why are you not with me now when I
need you most. After all what is this mortal tegument but a shell
which a man sloughs off in eternal evolution. Outside, the moon is
very bright upon the lake. The "Mulberry Moon," Nanca called it, and
loved its light. It shines in at her window now, but she can not see
it. Ann, because the moon is so bright to-night--because the name of
the moon goddess bears within it your name--let the name of my poor,
motherless little girl be Diane. Nanca called her "Little Red-winged
Blackbird!" I believe at the end she was thinking of the little girl
we left in the Indian village. They are very much alike. Poor Nanca!
The writing broke off with a wild scrawl. With agonized eyes Diane
pushed the letters away and stared at the quiet firelit room, building
again within its log walls the tragedy of her father's death. He had
lain there by the fire, his life snuffed out like a candle by his own
hand. The broken-hearted old man down South had carried the child of
his son away, fiercely denied the Indian blood, and pledged Aunt Agatha
to the keeping of the secret. And this was the net that had driven
Carl to the verge of insanity and sent Themar to his death in a Florida
swamp!
There was no princess--no child of the exiled Theodomir. The paper
stuffed in the candle-stick in a reckless moment had been but the
ingenious figment of a man's brain for the entertainment of an hour.
The old chief and Sho-caw with their broken tale to Philip had but
tangled the net the more. As the blood of the Indian mother had driven
Diane forth to the forest, so had the blood of the artist father driven
Keela forth from the Indian village, a wanderer apart from her people,
and Fate had relentlessly knotted the threads of their lives in a
Southern pine wood.