THE TWILIGHT TALE.
That eve I spoke those words again,
And then she hearkened what I said.
DANTE ROSSETTI.
The next day the Indians had a great hunt. A circle of men on foot and
on horseback was drawn around a large tract of forest on the western
side of the Willamette River. Gradually, with much shouting,
hallooing, and beating of bushes, the circle closed upon the game
within it, like the folds of a mighty serpent.
There was a prodigious slaughter, a mad scene of butchery, in which
the Indians exulted like fiends. Late in the afternoon they returned
to camp, stained with blood and loaded with the spoils of the chase.
Snoqualmie distinguished himself by killing a large bear, and its
claws, newly severed and bleeding, were added to his already ample
necklace of similar trophies.
Cecil remained in the almost deserted camp. He tried in vain to talk
with the few chiefs who had not gone out to join in the hunt.
Missionary work was utterly impossible that day. Wallulah and the
problem of his love filled his thoughts. His mind, aroused and
burning, searched and analyzed the question upon every side.
Should he tell Multnomah of Snoqualmie's cruelty, representing his
unfitness to be the husband of the gentle Wallulah?
To the stern war-chief that very cruelty would be an argument in
Snoqualmie's favor. Should he himself become a suitor for her hand? He
knew full well that Multnomah would reject him with disdain; or, were
he to consent, it would involve the Willamettes in a war with the
haughty and vindictive Cayuse. Finally, should he attempt to fly with
her to some other land? Impossible. All the tribes of the northwest
were held in the iron grip of Multnomah. They could never escape; and
even if they could, the good he had done among the Indians, the good
he hoped would grow from generation to generation, would be all
destroyed if it were told among them that he who claimed to come to
them with a message from God had ended by stealing the chief's
daughter. And had he a right to love any one?--had he a right to love
at all? God had sent him to do a work among the Indians; was it not
wicked for him to so much as look either to the right or to the left
till that work was done?
Amid this maze of perplexities, his tense, agonized soul sought in
vain for some solution, some conclusion. At times he sat in his lodge
and brooded over these things till he seemed wrought up almost to
madness, till his form trembled with excitement, and the old pain at
his heart grew sharp and deadly.
Then again, trying to shake it off, he went out among the few Indians
who were left in the camp and attempted to do missionary work; but
enthusiasm was lacking, the glow and tenderness was gone from his
words, the grand devotion that had inspired him so long failed him at
last. He was no longer a saintly apostle to the Indians; he was only a
human lover, torn by stormy human doubts and fears.
Even the Indians felt that some intangible change had come over him,
and as they listened their hearts no longer responded to his
eloquence; they felt somehow that the life was gone from his words. He
saw it too, and it gave him a keen pang.
He realized that the energy and concentration of his character was
gone, that a girl's beauty had drawn him aside from the mission on
which God had sent him.
"I will go and see her. I will, without letting her know that I love
her, give her to understand my position and her own. She shall see how
impossible it is for us ever to be aught to each other. And I shall
urge her to cling to God and walk in the path he has appointed for
her, while I go on in mine."
So thinking, he left his lodge that evening and took the path to
Wallulah's home.
Some distance from the encampment he met an Indian funeral procession.
The young Willamette runner had died that morning, and now they were
bearing him to the river, down which a canoe was to waft the body and
the mourners to the nearest _mimaluse_ island. The corpse was swathed
in skins and tied around with thongs; the father bore it on his
shoulder, for the dead had been but a slender lad. Behind them came
the mother and a few Indian women. As they passed, the father chanted
a rude lament.
"Oh, Mox-mox, my son, why did you go away and leave our wigwam empty?
You were not weak nor sickly, and your life was young. Why did you go?
Oh, Mox-mox, dead, dead, dead!"
Then the women took up the doleful refrain,--
"Oh, Mox-mox, dead, dead, dead!"
Then the old man again,--
"Oh, Mox-mox, the sun was warm and food was plenty, yet you went away;
and when we reach out for you, you are not there. Oh Mox-mox, dead,
dead, dead!"
Then the women again,--
"Oh, Mox-mox, dead, dead, dead!"
And so it went on, till they were embarked and the canoe bore them
from sight and hearing. Down on some _mimaluse_ island or rocky point,
they would stretch the corpse out in a canoe, with the bow and arrows
and fishing spear used in life beside it; then turn over it another
canoe like a cover, and so leave the dead to his long sleep.
The sight gave an added bitterness to Cecil's meditations.
"After all," he thought, "life is so short,--a shadow fleeting onward
to the night,--and love is so sweet! Why not open my heart to the
bliss it brings? The black ending comes so soon! Why not fling all
thought of consequences to the winds, and gather into my arms the love
that is offered me? why not know its warmth and thrill for one golden
moment, even though that moment ends in death?"
The blood rushed wildly through his veins, but he resolutely put down
the temptation. No, he would be faithful, he would not allow himself
even to think of such a thing.
Reluctantly, as before, the sentinels made way for him and he went on
through the wood to the trysting-place, for such it had come to be.
She was waiting. But there was no longer the glad illumination of
face, the glad springing forward to meet him. She advanced shyly, a
delicate color in her cheek, a tremulous grace in her manner, that he
had not observed before; the consciousness of love had come to her and
made her a woman. Never had she seemed so fair to Cecil; yet his
resolution did not falter.
"I have come, you see,--come to tell you that I can come no more, and
to talk with you about your future."
Her face grew very pale.
"Are you going away?" she asked sorrowfully, "and shall I never see
you again?"
"I cannot come back," he replied gently. The sight of her suffering
cut him to the heart.
"It has been much to see you," he continued, while she stood before
him, looking downward, without reply. "It has been like meeting one of
my own people. I shall never forget you."
She raised her head and strove to answer, but the words died on her
lips. How he loathed himself, talking so smoothly to her while he
hungered to take her in his arms and tell her how he loved her!
Again he spoke.
"I hope you will be happy with Snoqualmie, and--"
She lifted her eyes with a sudden light flashing in their black
depths.
"Do you want me to hate him? Never speak his name to me again!"
"He is to be your husband; nay, it is the wish of your father, and the
great sachems approve it."
"Can the sachems put love in my heart? Can the sachems make my heart
receive him as its lord? Ah, this bitter custom of the father giving
his daughter to whomsoever he will, as if she were a dog! And your
lips sanction it!"
Her eyes were full of tears. Scarcely realizing what he did, he tried
to take her hand. The slender fingers shrank from his and were drawn
away.
"I do not sanction it, it is a bitter custom; but it is to be, and I
only wished to smooth your pathway. I want to say or do something that
will help you when I am gone."
"Do you know what it would be for me to be an Indian's wife? To cut
the wood, and carry the water, and prepare the food,--that would be
sweet to do for one I loved. But to toil amid dirt and filth for a
savage whom I could only abhor, to feel myself growing coarse and
squalid with my surroundings,--I could not live!"
She shuddered as she spoke, as if the very thought was horrible.
"You hate this degraded Indian life as much as I do, and yet it is the
life you would push me into," she continued, in a tone of mournful
heart-broken reproach. It stung him keenly.
"It is not the life I would push you into. God knows I would give my
life to take one thorn from yours," The mad longing within him rushed
into his voice in spite of himself, making it thrill with a passionate
tenderness that brought the color back into her pallid cheek. "But I
cannot remain," he went on, "I dare not; all that I can do is to say
something that may help you in the future."
She looked at him with dilated eyes full of pain and bewilderment.
"I have no future if you go away. Why must you go? What will be left
me after you are gone? Think how long I was here alone after my mother
died, with no one to understand me, no one to talk to. Then you came,
and I was happy. It was like light shining in the darkness; now it
goes out and I can never hope again. Why must you go away and leave
Wallulah in the dark?"
There was a childlike plaintiveness and simplicity in her tone; and
she came close to him, looking up in his face with wistful, pleading
eyes, the beautiful face wan and drawn with bewilderment and pain, yet
never so beautiful as now.
Cecil felt the unspeakable cruelty of his attitude toward her, and his
face grew white as death in an awful struggle between love and duty.
But he felt that he must leave her or be disloyal to his God.
"I do not wish to go away. But God has called me to a great work, and
I must do it. I dare not turn aside. You cannot know how dear your
presence is to me, or how bitter it is for me to part from you. But
our parting must be, else the work I have done among the tribes will
be scattered to the winds and the curse of God will be on me as a
false and fallen prophet."
He spoke with a kind of fierceness, striving blindly to battle down
the mad longing within, and his tones had a harshness that he was too
agitated to notice. She drew back involuntarily. There came into her
face a dignity he had never seen before. She was but a recluse and a
girl, but she was of royal lineage by right of both her parents, and
his words had roused a spirit worthy the daughter of Multnomah.
"Am I a weight on you? Are you afraid I will bring a curse upon you?
Do not fear, I shall no longer ask you to stay. Wallulah shall take
herself out of your life."
She gave him a look full of despair, as if seeing all hope go from her
forever; then she said simply, "Farewell," and turned away.
But in spite of her dignity there was an anguish written on her sweet
pale face that he could not resist. All his strength of resolve, all
his conviction of duty, crumbled into dust as she turned away; and he
was conscious only that he loved her, that he could not let her go.
How it happened he never knew, but she was clasped in his arms, his
kisses were falling on brow and cheek in a passionate outburst that
could be kept back no longer. At first, she trembled in his arms and
shrank away from him; then she nestled close, as if sheltering herself
in the love that was hers at last. After awhile she lifted a face over
which a shadow of pain yet lingered.
"But you said I would bring you a curse; you feared--"
He stopped her with a caress.
"Even curses would be sweet if they came through you. Forget what I
said, remember only that I love you!"
And she was content.
Around them the twilight darkened into night; the hours came and went
unheeded by these two, wrapped in that golden love-dream which for a
moment brings Eden back again to this gray old earth, all desolate as
it is with centuries of woe and tears.
But while they talked there was on him a vague dread, an indefinable
misgiving, a feeling that he was disloyal to his mission, disloyal to
her; that their love could have but one ending, and that a dark one.
Still he strove hard to forget everything, to shut out all the
world,--drinking to the full the bliss of the present, blinding his
eyes to the pain of the future.
But after they parted, when her presence was withdrawn and he was
alone, he felt like a man faithless and dishonored; like a prophet who
had bartered the salvation of the people to whom he had been sent, in
exchange for a woman's kisses, which could bring him only disgrace and
death.
As he went back to the camp in the stillness of midnight, he was
startled by a distant roar, and saw through the tree-tops flames
bursting from the far-off crater of Mount Hood. The volcano was
beginning one of its periodical outbursts. But to Cecil's mind, imbued
with the gloomy supernaturalism of early New England, and
unconsciously to himself, tinged in later years with the superstition
of the Indians among whom he had lived so long, that ominous roar,
those flames leaping up into the black skies of night, seemed a sign
of the wrath of God.