MOONLIGHT

Ralph lay under a blanket roof staring at the fire. Sleep was banished

to the other side of the world from his eyelids. His body was still,

and his brain with inconceivable rapidity and completeness was flashing

pictures before his inner eye. So vivid, so involuntary was this

process, that he felt as if it were taking place independently of him.

There he lay, the quiet self that he knew, with a mad, foreign sprite

turning the wheels inside his skull, and he helpless to think or to act

in his own person.

The pictures were all of Nahnya: Nahnya as he had first regarded her, a

common Indian girl, blind fool that he was, Nahnya sleeping with a

smile, on the deck under the lantern; Nahnya glorious at the helm in

the rapids; Nahnya, flashing-eyed, defending herself from him--the

beast that he had been! Nahnya weeping in the grass at midnight;

Nahnya reproachful and despairing when she found the white man in her

sanctuary; and finally Nahnya as she had unconsciously revealed herself

in all the phases of her own story: modest, true, and brave as Ruth,

and intolerably persecuted.

"Oh, heaven! what a shame!" he cried, with a heart wrung with rage and

compassion. "And I can do nothing to square it! O God! how noble she

is! And how beautiful!"

Beauty seemed of lesser moment to him now. His soul prostrated itself

before the shining gold of the character she had revealed. Simple and

strong and self-forgetful as a saint of the middle ages, he saw her.

"If this is to be an Indian," he thought wildly, "I will be one! God

knows, she makes me ashamed of my own race!"

He was tormented by the necessity of unburdening his breast to Nahnya.

At the conclusion of her story with too much emotion he had been dumb.

Before he was able to speak she had escaped him. Now the thought that

she might doubt what he felt was dreadful to him. Nahnya, he knew, was

too prone to blame herself. Her sad cry more than once repeated: "I

think I have a curse upon me!" broke his heart. He was mad to reassure

her. It was intolerable to be obliged to wait until morning.

By and by his little fire died down, and across the lake, above the

superb peak in the centre of the eastern wall, he became aware of a

delicate radiance in the sky. His heart rose, thinking it was dawn.

But this was a tenderer and more unearthly light than day. The great

peak was silhouetted against it, the outline faintly luminous. Ralph

was struck by its likeness to a titanic thumb; the thumb of the Earth

Maker, as the red men say. It was the same peak that he had seen from

the other side. Presently there appeared above it the blade of a

silver scimitar. The wasted moon slowly mounted the ramp of heaven,

like a lady wan with a sorrow bravely borne--like Nahnya.

Her light descended into the valley with ineffable tenderness. The

trees on the nearer shore were painted with a brush of silver-dust, and

the light of dreams was spread on the grass. The lake was no longer a

lake of water, but of a fairy vapour that slowly crept across to the

opposite shore as the shadow of the mountain retreated. The whole

valley was like a bowl slowly filling with moonlight poured from the

tilted silver chalice held aloft.

Only to those whose hearts have become prescient through suffering does

the moon fully reveal herself. Ralph with a catch of the breath beheld

her for the first. The soft potency of her beauty drew him out from

under his blanket to stand upright in the purifying rays. His pain was

at the same time soothed and deepened, like a tearing rapid received

into still water below. The ugly, nagging thoughts that throng upon

the agitation of wakefulness were exorcized, and the great matter stood

out clear.

"I love her!" Ralph silently vowed to the moon. "Please God I'll make

myself worthy of it! I'll make up to her if I can something of what

she has suffered!"

He sat down at the edge of the bank where Nahnya had sat that day. A

great wave of emotion made a clean sweep through him, drowning

selfishness, and lifting his better self high on its crest. Everything

in him was changed, he felt. All his life up to this moment had been a

sordid affair; it should be different hereafter. For the first time

Ralph was caught up to the heights of emotion, and the poor youth

thought he could remain there.

On the deepest note of his heart he breathed: "Thank God for something

noble to love!"

Across the lake the mountain under the moon was still black down to the

water's edge, but about its summit certain planes of snow had caught

the moonlight, making an effect of weird, pale loveliness up there.

Behind him the mountains to the west were fully revealed. Withdrawn

and misty in the moonlight they suggested not hard facts of rock and

ice and snow, but lovely, suspended fantasies of the imagination.

The strip of beach with the canoes lying upon it was at Ralph's feet.

Very slowly through the haze of his dreams he became aware that there

were only two canoes below instead of the three that belonged there.

When the fact fully penetrated his understanding, his heart bounded in

his breast. Was it possible that Nahnya----! He knew that, like

himself, she had no love for a sleepless bed. If he could only find

her somewhere in the moonlight, and pour out the weight of emotion that

overcharged his breast! Leaping down the bank, he lifted one of the

remaining canoes into the water, and embarked.

He found her. Half a mile up the lake, out in the middle, she was

resting on her paddle, woman and canoe making a graceful shadow-picture

in the path of moonlight. Hearing him coming, she made no effort to

escape, nor when their canoes gently collided, expressed any surprise

at his coming. He could not see into her face, but from her still air

he guessed that the moonlight had softened her, too. Seeing her so

still and lovely, his heart swelled in his breast, throttling speech

again. Clinging to the gunwale of her canoe, he could only look at

her. They faced each other in the attitude of prayer.

Nahnya spoke first. "It is beautiful to-night," she said softly. The

pain had gone out of her voice.

"Sunlight or moonlight," Ralph said simply, "this is the most beautiful

place I have ever seen."

There was a light breeze from the direction of camp. It swung the two

canoes gradually around, and propelled them slowly up the lake. The

moon now shone in Nahnya's face. Like the brush of a master-painter it

blotted out unessential detail in order to reveal in dim, suggestive

lights and shadows the very spirit of beauty dwelling there. Ralph

thought he had already encompassed her beauty and he was amazed. He

leaned toward her, gazing like a despairing sinner at a vision of

heaven. There was a long silence.

It terrified Nahnya. Obliged to say something, anything to break it,

in her agitation she said the wrong thing. "It is late. We must go

back."

"Late!" cried Ralph, suddenly finding speech. "What does it matter!

What does anything matter! I must speak to you. There will never be

another night, another time like this!"

Again the sweet and terrible silence that discharged lightnings from

heart to heart. Nahnya, half-swooning, still resisted the current

desperately.

"I must go," she murmured, and picked up her paddle.

Ralph clung to her canoe. She could not escape him.

"That was a wonderful story you told me," he murmured at last.

This provided her a loophole of escape from the tender influences that

betrayed her. "Wonderful!" she said in a stronger voice, and bitterly.

"It is an ugly story!"

"Ugly for the beasts of white men you were thrown among!" he cried with

rising indignation that half suffocated him. "I always hated the life

of cities. Now I am ashamed of my race into the bargain. Nahnya, if I

could make it up to you in some way!"

"It is nothing to me now," she said quickly.

"Nahnya, I've got to tell you how it made me feel," he went on in a

low, moved voice. "I couldn't sleep without telling you. It made me

mad with rage that things like that could happen to a woman like you.

You ought to be the happiest woman in the world! And--and there's

something else. I wish I could say it right. You don't know how fine

you are, Nahnya. It is you who are wonderful. I never knew anybody

like you. When I think of myself, what I have been, I feel as if I

should go down on my knees to you. I suppose every man is born with a

dream in his heart of a woman like you, brave and good and true like

you, but few men meet her!"

This was infinitely worse to her than the silence. "Don't talk! Don't

talk!" she murmured in a voice sharp with apprehension. "It hurts me!"

Ralph's bursting heart having found an outlet was not to be stopped.

"I love you!" he said.

A queer little cry escaped her. She instinctively drove her paddle

into the water, but Ralph clung to her canoe. She dropped the paddle,

and covered her face with her hands.

Ralph, misinterpreting the cry, was wounded to the quick. "It's not

the same," he cried. "I am different from those others. I love you

truly. With the best there is in me. This is for life, Nahnya."

"Me, a red girl," she murmured. "You are crazy!"

"I don't care about that," he said quickly. "You're the woman I have

dreamed of all my life!"

Her hands came down from her face, and gripped the sides of the canoe.

Ralph quickly covered one of them with his own. She snatched her hand

away. "Stop! Stop!" she murmured. "This is madness! You and I!

What good could come of it!"

"Come of it?" said Ralph. "I'm asking you to marry me."

"Marry!" she whispered, with a piteous catch in her breath. Her hands

were twisted together in a way that he knew. "Let me go!" she said

imploringly. "Please, _please_ let me go!"

"No!" he said grimly. "There's no use running away from it! You and I

have got to have it out here and now!" His voice deepened into

tenderness again. "I love you," he said. "I ask you to marry me. Why

does that distress you so?"

"Wait!" she whispered shakily. "We must quiet down. We must think.

There is much to be said. I must say it. Let me be quiet!"

"All right," he said, on his deepest note. "I'll wait. When it's the

real thing a man can be patient!" He suddenly leaned toward her again.

"Ah! if you knew how I loved you! With every bit of good there is in

me! I want to do the best thing for you. I want to take care of you!

I can't tell you how I feel. It will take years to show it!"

"Oh, don't!" she whispered painfully and low. "This hurt me more

than--those things I told you. Nothing can come of it! I have a curse

on me!"

"That's nonsense!" cried Ralph quickly. "I'll take care of the curse!"

"There is no place in all the world where we could go," she breathed.

"We will stay here!" said Ralph. "Don't you understand I am willing to

give up everything I have known. It's no sacrifice, because I never

set any store by it anyway. There's a good work to be done here, I'll

help you."

"You are white," she murmured. "You cannot help here!"

"Nahnya!" he cried reproachfully.

"Wait!" she said. "Let me say it all! It must be said!" Her voice

was gaining in strength and assurance. "I much wish I could say it

just right! They are happy here now. I have sworn to St. Jean to keep

them from the whites!"

"St. Jean Bateese likes me," put in Ralph.

"Why not?" she said. "We think you are a good man. But you are white.

You have the white man's strong eye. Oh! if I could say it right! If

you come here, you do not want it, but you are soon the master. You

have many thoughts they cannot understand, white men's thoughts, and

your eye is more strong than theirs. They try to be like you and they

lose themselves. They cannot be the same as you, and so they are

nothing!"

"But you," said Ralph, "you and I understand each other, and you get

along here."

"Because I have the same blood in me," she answered. "I know them

without speaking. You do not know them."

"I will make myself one of them!" cried Ralph.

"I have seen white men do that," Nahnya said relentlessly. "When they

come live in a tepee, Indian way, the red people scorn them. The white

men hang their heads and look sideways like beaten dogs. They never

forget they white once. That is worse."

Ralph, in his eagerness to persuade her, scarcely listened to what she

said. "If you don't want me here, let us go and live outside the

valley," he said. "You have started them right; you could come and see

them sometimes. I would not come."

She shook her head. "It is madness!" she murmured. "Always I am

thinking that. If you marry me, other white men laugh and call you

fool. If all white men think little of you, you never be big man among

them. By and by, soon now, white women will be come in this country.

White women hate me, and hate you for taking me. We always alone. You

sicken of me then. Oh! I have seen it! If I have children they are

cursed like me." She paused. Passion shook the quiet voice. "I would

kill my children before that come to them!" Her voice rose, impatient

at last with too much pain. "I can't say it right! What's the use!

Somehow it is wrong. White must mate with white, and red with red.

Me, I am nothing. I will go alone!"

Her last words stabbed at his breast like a knife. He leaned toward

her. "I won't have it!" he cried passionately. "You make me mad when

you talk that way! You're crazy on the subject! Oh, I don't blame

you! The finest woman God ever made to be wasted! It's not possible!

I love you with all my heart and soul! I think you love me back

again--you hesitate. What do all these things matter? If you love me

you've got to marry me!"

"I hesitate? Why not?" she said quickly. She had command of herself

now. "I am a poor red girl. A white man, a doctor, ask me to marry

him. It is a great thing for me. I hesitate. But I know now. I will

not do it."

"Give me a straight answer!" cried Ralph. "Do you love me?"

There was silence for the space of time between the opening and the

closing of a door. Ralph hung upon her answer with all his faculties

suspended. He heard her draw a steadying breath.

"No!" she said.

The soft clearness with which she produced it was horribly convincing.

So strong a spell had her honesty cast upon him, that he never

questioned her denial. He fell back into his own canoe, and the two

drifted a little apart. He remained motionless on his knees, his hands

grasping the gunwales mechanically. His world was tumbling around his

ears. The moonlight was flat and garish. As yet he felt no pain; only

an immeasurable disgust of living.

Nahnya became alarmed by his silence. "What are you thinking?" she

asked sharply.

With an immense effort Ralph pulled himself together. "It's all

right," his lips said. The voice that issued from them was strange in

his ears. "I have been a fool, that's all. You are not to blame in

any way."

He picked up his paddle like an automaton. "Let us go back," he said,

in the same quiet, stiff voice.