THE WHITE WOMAN IN THE WOOD.
I seek a sail that never looms from out the purple haze
At rosy dawn, or fading eve, or in the noontide's blaze.
CELIA THAXTER.
Cecil walked listlessly on through the wood. He was worn out by the
day's efforts, though it was as yet but the middle of the afternoon.
There was a feeling of exhaustion in his lungs, a fluttering pain
about his heart, the result of years of over-work upon a delicate
frame. With this feeling of physical weakness came always the fear
that his strength might give way ere his work was done. Nor was this
all. In these times of depression, the longing to see again the faces
of his friends, to have again the sweet graceful things of the life
that was forever closed to him, rushed over him in a bitter flood.
The trail led him to the bank of the Columbia, some distance below the
encampment. He looked out over the blue river sweeping majestically
on, the white snow-peaks, the canyons deep in the shadows of
afternoon, the dense forest beyond the river extending away to the
unknown and silent North as far as his eyes could reach.
"It is wonderful, wonderful!" he thought. "But I would give it all to
look upon one white face."
So musing, he passed on down the bank of the river. He was now perhaps
two miles from the camp and seemingly in complete solitude. After a
little the path turned away from the beach and led toward the
interior. As he entered the woodland he came upon several Indian
sentinels who lay, bow in hand, beside the path. They sprang up, as if
to intercept his passage; but seeing that it was the white _shaman_
whom Multnomah had honored, and who had sat at the council with the
great sachems, they let him go on. Cecil indistinctly remembered
having heard from some of the Indians that this part of the island was
strictly guarded; he had forgotten why. So absorbed was he in his
gloomy reflections that he did not stop to question the sentinels, but
went on, not thinking that he might be treading on forbidden ground.
By and by the path emerged from the wood upon a little prairie; the
cottonwoods shut out the Indians from him, and he was again alone. The
sunshine lay warm and golden on the little meadow, and he strolled
forward mechanically, thinking how like it was to some of the sylvan
lawns of his own New England forests. Again the shade of trees fell
over the path. He looked up, his mind full of New England memories,
and saw something that made his heart stand still. For there, not far
from him, stood a girl clad in soft flowing drapery, the dress of a
white woman. In Massachusetts a woman's dress would have been the last
thing Cecil would have noticed. Now, so long accustomed to the Indian
squaws' rough garments of skin or plaited bark, the sight of that
graceful woven cloth sent through him an indescribable thrill.
He went on, his eager eyes drinking in the welcome sight, yet scarcely
believing what he saw.
She had not yet observed him. The profile of her half-averted face was
very sweet and feminine; her form was rounded, and her hair fell in
long black ringlets to the shoulders. He was in the presence of a
young and beautiful woman,--a white woman! All this he noted at a
glance; noted, too, the drooping lashes, the wistful lines about the
lips, the mournful expression that shadowed the beauty of her face.
Who was she? Where could she have come from?
She heard the approaching footsteps and turned toward him. Absolute
bewilderment was on her face for a moment, and then it glowed with
light and joy. Her dark, sad eyes sparkled. She was radiant, as if
some great, long-looked for happiness had come to her. She came
eagerly toward him, holding out her hands in impetuous welcome; saying
something in a language he did not understand, but which he felt could
not be Indian, so refined and pleasing were the tones.
He answered he knew not what, in his own tongue, and she paused
perplexed. Then he spoke again, this time in Willamette.
She shrank back involuntarily.
"That language?" she replied in the same tongue, but with a tremor of
disappointment in her voice. "I thought you were of my mother's race
and spoke her language. But you _are_ white, like her people?"
She had given him both her hands, and he stood holding them; looking
down into her eager, lifted face, where a great hope and a great doubt
in mingled light and shadow strove together.
"I am a white man. I came from a land far to the East. But who are
you, and how came you here?"
She did not seem to hear the last words, only the first.
"No, no," she protested eagerly, "you came not from the East but from
the West, the land across the sea that my mother came from in the ship
that was wrecked." And she withdrew one hand and pointed toward the
wooded range beyond which lay the Pacific.
He shook his head. "No, there are white people in those lands too, but
I never saw them. I came from the East," he said, beginning to surmise
that she must be an Asiatic. She drew away the hand that he still held
in his, and her eyes filled with tears.
"I thought you were one of my mother's people," she murmured; and he
felt that the pang of an exceeding disappointment was rilling her
heart.
"Who are you?" he asked gently.
"The daughter of Multnomah."
Cecil remembered now what he had heard of the dead white wife of
Multnomah, and of her daughter, who, it was understood among the
tribes, was to be given to Snoqualmie. He noticed, too, for the first
time the trace of the Indian in her expression, as the light faded
from it and it settled back into the despondent look habitual to it.
All that was chivalrous in his nature went out to the fair young
creature; all his being responded to the sting of her disappointment.
"I am not what you hoped I was, but your face is like the face of the
women of my own land. Shall we not be friends?"
She looked up wistfully at the handsome and noble countenance above
her, so different from the stolid visages she had known so long.
"Yes; you are not Indian."
In that one expression she unconsciously told Cecil how her sensitive
nature shrank from the barbarism around her; how the tastes and
aspirations she had inherited from her mother reached out for better
and higher things.
In a little while they were seated on a grassy bank in the shade of
the trees, talking together. She bade him tell her of his people. She
listened intently; the bright, beautiful look came back as she heard
the tale.
"They are kind to women, instead of making them mere burden-bearers;
they have pleasant homes; they dwell in cities? Then they are like my
mother's people."
"They are gentle, kind, humane. They have all the arts that light up
life and make it beautiful,--not like the tribes of this grim,
bloodstained land."
"_This_ land!" Her face darkened and she lifted her hand in a quick,
repelling gesture. "This land is a grave. The clouds lie black and
heavy on the spirit that longs for the sunlight and cannot reach it."
She turned to him again. "Go on, your words are music."
He continued, and she listened till the story of his country and his
wanderings was done. When he ended, she drew a glad, deep breath; her
eyes were sparkling with joy.
"I am content," she said, in a voice in which there was a deep
heart-thrill of happiness. "Since my mother died I have been alone,
all alone; and I longed, oh so often, for some one who talked and felt
as she did to come to me, and now you have come. I sat cold and
shivering in the night a long time, but the light and warmth have come
at last. Truly, Allah is good!"
"Allah!"
"Yes; he was my mother's God, as the Great Spirit is my father's."
"They are both names for the same All Father," replied Cecil. "They
mean the same thing, even as the sun is called by many names by many
tribes, yet there is but the one sun."
"Then I am glad. It is good to learn that both prayed to the one God,
though they did not know it. But my mother taught me to use the name
of Allah, and not the other. And while my father and the tribes call
me by my Indian name, 'Wallulah,' she gave me another, a secret name,
that I was never to forget."
"What is it?"
"I have never told it, but I will tell you, for you can understand."
And she gave him a singularly melodious name, of a character entirely
different from any he had ever heard, but which he guessed to be
Arabic or Hindu.
"It means, 'She who watches for the morning.' My mother told me never
to forget it, and to remember that I was not to let myself grow to be
like the Indians, but to pray to Allah, and to watch and hope, and
that sometime the morning would come and I would be saved from the
things around me. And now you have come and the dawn comes with
you."
Her glad, thankful glance met his; the latent grace and mobility of
her nature, all roused and vivid under his influence, transfigured her
face, making it delicately lovely. A great pang of longing surged
through him.
"Oh," he thought, "had I not become a missionary, I might have met and
loved some one like her! I might have filled my life with much that is
now gone from it forever!"
For eight years he had seen only the faces of savage women and still
more savage men; for eight years his life had been steeped in
bitterness, and all that was tender or romantic in his nature had been
cramped, as in iron fetters, by the coarseness and stolidity around
him. Now, after all that dreary time, he met one who had the beauty
and the refinement of his own race. Was it any wonder that her glance,
the touch of her dress or hair, the soft tones of her voice, had for
him an indescribable charm? Was it any wonder that his heart went out
to her in a yearning tenderness that although not love was dangerously
akin to it?
He was startled at the sweet and burning tumult of emotion she was
kindling within him. What was he thinking of? He must shake these
feelings off, or leave her. Leave her! The gloom of the savagery that
awaited him at the camp grew tenfold blacker than ever. All the light
earth held for him seemed gathered into the presence of this dark-eyed
girl who sat talking so musically, so happily, by his side.
"I must go," he forced himself to say at length, "The sun is almost
down."
"Must you go so soon?"
"I will come again if you wish."
"But you must not go yet; wait till the sun reaches the mountain-tops
yonder. I want you to tell me more about your own land."
So he lingered and talked while the sun sank lower and lower in the
west. It seemed to him that it had never gone down so fast before.
"I must go now," he said, rising as the sun's red disk sank behind the
mountains.
"It is not late; see, the sun is shining yet on the brow of the snow
mountains."
Both looked at the peaks that towered grandly in the light of the
sunken sun while all the world below lay in shadow. Together they
watched the mighty miracle of the afterglow on Mount Tacoma, the soft
rose-flush that transfigured the mountain till it grew transparent,
delicate, wonderful.
"That is what my life is now,--since you have brought the light to the
'watcher for the morning;'" and she looked up at him with a bright,
trustful smile.
"Alas?" thought Cecil, "it is not the light of morning but of
sunset."
Slowly the radiance faded, the rose tint passed; the mountain grew
white and cold under their gaze, like the face of death. Wallulah
shuddered as if it were a prophecy.
"You will come back to-morrow?" she said, looking at him with her
large, appealing eyes.
"I will come," he said.
"It will seem long till your return, yet I have lived so many years
waiting for that which has come at last that I have learned to be
patient."
"Ask God to help you in your hours of loneliness and they will not
seem so long and dark," said Cecil, whose soul was one tumultuous
self-reproach that he had let the time go by without telling her more
of God.
"Ah!" she said in a strange, wistful way, "I have prayed to him so
much, but he could not fill _all_ my heart. I wanted so to touch a
hand and look on a face like my mother's. But God has sent you, and so
I know he must be good."
They parted, and he went back to the camp.
"Is my mission a failure?" he thought, as he walked along, clinching
his hands in furious anger with himself. "Why do I let a girl's beauty
move me thus, and she the promised wife of another? How dare I think
of aught beside the work God has sent me here to do? Oh, the shame and
guilt of such weakness! I will be faithful. I will never look upon her
face again!"
He emerged from the wood into the camp; its multitudinous sounds were
all around him, and never had the coarseness and savagery of Indian
life seemed so repellent as now, when he came back to it with his mind
full of Wallulah's grace and loveliness. It was harsh discord after
music.
Stripped and painted barbarians were hallooing, feasting, dancing; the
whole camp was alive with boisterous hilarity, the result of a day of
good fellowship. Mothers were calling their children in the dusk and
young men were sportively answering, "Here I am, mother." Here and
there, Indians who had been feasting all day lay like gorged anacondas
beside the remnant of their meal; others, who had been gambling, were
talking loudly of the results of the game.
Through it all the white man walked with swift footsteps, looking
neither to the right nor the left, till he gained his lodge. He flung
himself on his bed and lay there, his fingers strained together
convulsively, his nerves throbbing with pain; vainly struggling with
regret, vainly repeating to himself that he cared nothing for love and
home, that he had put all those things from him, that he was engrossed
now only in his work.
"Never, never! It can never be."
* * * * *
And the English exploring-ship in Yaquina Bay was to weigh anchor on
the morrow, and sail up nearer along the unknown coast. The Indians
had all deserted the sea-board for the council. Would Cecil hear?
Would any one see the sail and bring the news?
[Illustration: "_I Will kill him!_"]