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