Ralph lay under a blanket roof staring at the fire. Sleep was banished1 to the other side of the world from his eyelids2. 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 skull3, 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 sanctuary4; 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 persecuted5.
"Oh, heaven! what a shame!" he cried, with a heart wrung6 with rage and compassion7. "And I can do nothing to square it! O God! how noble she is! And how beautiful!"
Beauty seemed of lesser8 moment to him now. His soul prostrated9 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 tormented10 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 prone11 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 reassure12 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 silhouetted13 against it, the outline faintly luminous14. Ralph was struck by its likeness15 to a titanic16 thumb; the thumb of the Earth Maker17, 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 ramp18 of heaven, like a lady wan19 with a sorrow bravely borne—like Nahnya.
Her light descended20 into the valley with ineffable21 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 tilted22 silver chalice23 held aloft.
Only to those whose hearts have become prescient through suffering does the moon fully24 reveal herself. Ralph with a catch of the breath beheld25 her for the first. The soft potency26 of her beauty drew him out from under his blanket to stand upright in the purifying rays. His pain was at the same time soothed27 and deepened, like a tearing rapid received into still water below. The ugly, nagging28 thoughts that throng29 upon the agitation30 of wakefulness were exorcized, and the great matter stood out clear.
"I love her!" Ralph silently vowed31 to the moon. "Please God I'll make myself worthy32 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 crest33. Everything in him was changed, he felt. All his life up to this moment had been a sordid34 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 weird35, pale loveliness up there. Behind him the mountains to the west were fully revealed. Withdrawn36 and misty37 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 haze38 of his dreams he became aware that there were only two canoes below instead of the three that belonged there. When the fact fully penetrated39 his understanding, his heart bounded in his breast. Was it possible that Nahnya——! He knew that, like himself, she had no love for a sleepless40 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 embarked41.
He found her. Half a mile up the lake, out in the middle, she was resting on her paddle, woman and canoe making a graceful42 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 softened43 her, too. Seeing her so still and lovely, his heart swelled44 in his breast, throttling45 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 spoke46 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 blotted47 out unessential detail in order to reveal in dim, suggestive lights and shadows the very spirit of beauty dwelling48 there. Ralph thought he had already encompassed49 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 desperately50.
"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 suffocated51 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 infinitely52 worse to her than the silence. "Don't talk! Don't talk!" she murmured in a voice sharp with apprehension53. "It hurts me!"
Ralph's bursting heart having found an outlet54 was not to be stopped. "I love you!" he said.
A queer little cry escaped her. She instinctively55 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 imploringly56. "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 distress57 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 relentlessly58. "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 passionately59. "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 faculties60 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 garish61. 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 automaton62. "Let us go back," he said, in the same quiet, stiff voice.
Later he said: "I will go away just as soon as I can leave your mother."
"I can dress her arm," Nahnya said, "or Ahahweh can. I have teach her."
"All right," Ralph said. "I'll start back to-morrow."
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1
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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2
eyelids
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| n.眼睑( eyelid的名词复数 )；眼睛也不眨一下；不露声色；面不改色 | |
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skull
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| n.头骨；颅骨 | |
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sanctuary
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| n.圣所，圣堂，寺庙；禁猎区，保护区 | |
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5
persecuted
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| （尤指宗教或政治信仰的）迫害(~sb. for sth.)( persecute的过去式和过去分词 )； 烦扰，困扰或骚扰某人 | |
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6
wrung
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| 绞( wring的过去式和过去分词 )； 握紧（尤指别人的手）； 把（湿衣服）拧干； 绞掉（水） | |
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7
compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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8
lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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9
prostrated
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| v.使俯伏，使拜倒( prostrate的过去式和过去分词 )；（指疾病、天气等）使某人无能为力 | |
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10
tormented
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| 饱受折磨的 | |
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11
prone
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| adj.(to)易于…的，很可能…的；俯卧的 | |
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12
reassure
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| v.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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13
silhouetted
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| 显出轮廓的，显示影像的 | |
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14
luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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15
likeness
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| n.相像，相似（之处） | |
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16
titanic
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| adj.巨人的，庞大的，强大的 | |
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17
maker
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| n.制造者，制造商 | |
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ramp
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| n.暴怒，斜坡，坡道；vi.作恐吓姿势，暴怒，加速；vt.加速 | |
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19
wan
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| (wide area network)广域网 | |
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descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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21
ineffable
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| adj.无法表达的，不可言喻的 | |
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22
tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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23
chalice
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| n.圣餐杯；金杯毒酒 | |
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24
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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25
beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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26
potency
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| n. 效力，潜能 | |
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27
soothed
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| v.安慰( soothe的过去式和过去分词 )；抚慰；使舒服；减轻痛苦 | |
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28
nagging
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| adj.唠叨的，挑剔的；使人不得安宁的v.不断地挑剔或批评（某人）( nag的现在分词 )；不断地烦扰或伤害（某人）；无休止地抱怨；不断指责 | |
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29
throng
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| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
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30
agitation
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| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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31
vowed
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| 起誓，发誓（vow的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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32
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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33
crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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34
sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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35
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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36
withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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37
misty
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| adj.雾蒙蒙的，有雾的 | |
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38
haze
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| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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39
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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40
sleepless
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| adj.不睡眠的，睡不著的，不休息的 | |
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41
embarked
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| 乘船( embark的过去式和过去分词 )； 装载； 从事 | |
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42
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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43
softened
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| （使）变软( soften的过去式和过去分词 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰 | |
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44
swelled
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| 增强( swell的过去式和过去分词 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情） | |
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45
throttling
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| v.扼杀( throttle的现在分词 )；勒死；使窒息；压制 | |
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46
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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47
blotted
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| 涂污( blot的过去式和过去分词 )； （用吸墨纸）吸干 | |
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48
dwelling
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| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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49
encompassed
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| v.围绕( encompass的过去式和过去分词 )；包围；包含；包括 | |
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50
desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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51
suffocated
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| （使某人）窒息而死( suffocate的过去式和过去分词 )； （将某人）闷死； 让人感觉闷热； 憋气 | |
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52
infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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53
apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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54
outlet
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| n.出口/路；销路；批发商店；通风口；发泄 | |
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55
instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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56
imploringly
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| adv. 恳求地, 哀求地 | |
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57
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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58
relentlessly
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| adv.不屈不挠地；残酷地；不间断 | |
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59
passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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60
faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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61
garish
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| adj.华丽而俗气的，华而不实的 | |
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62
automaton
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| n.自动机器，机器人 | |
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