The Bridge of the Gods Part 16

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage; 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 n.o.ble 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 gra.s.sy 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 coa.r.s.eness 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.