Part 9

"One day in the street I hear a man say my father's name. 'That is he,' he said, and I look and I see my father. He is riding in a fine motor-car with his white wife and his white children. My heart beat fast to see him. He is a handsome, proud man, not very old yet. He was just a boy when he was in our country; my mot'er tell me so. A boy with yellow hair who laugh all the time and play jokes, she say. Still he likes to laugh I see by the lines in his face.

"After I see him in his fine motor-car I am more scare. What does he want with a poor girl like me, I think, and I do nothing to see him. But all the time I read the newspapers to find out what he does. Then I see there is going to be a big, what you call, political meeting, and my father is going to speak. So I go to the skating-rink on that night, and all the people look at me because there is no other red girl go to that political meeting. But I not care. I am crazy to hear my father's voice. When he stand up to speak my heart knock in my breast like the stick-kettle when the people dance.

"He speaks. It is beautiful. I do not understand it all, but I am happy because my father is a good, kind man who wishes good to all the poor people. Always he is working for the people, he says. His voice was as sweet and strong as an organ in church. When I hear him speak I know for sure he is my father, because I feel the same inside as him, but I cannot speak it.

"After that I think much I go to see him. I am afraid and I am not afraid. I think why should I be afraid, he is kind, he feels for poor people. I think maybe I go as a poor girl, and not tell him I am his daughter. At last I go.

"When I see his house I am scare again. It is as big as a hill. It has a hundred windows. Long time I walk outside the yard. 'You are a fool,' I say to me. 'You have done nothing against him; he will not be angry.' At last I go to the door. A man comes. He say my father is out and close the door to me. As I am going down the steps my father comes in his motor-car. He asks me what I want. I say I want to see him. He laugh and take me inside with him, into a room. It is like a dream. My legs are shaking.

"It is a beautiful room with high windows. All around the walls there are books with different coloured covers. There is a big desk, and he sit behind it, and lean back and pull off his gloves. He smile. He has beautiful white teeth, like my mot'er tell me, and he ask me again what I want. I am so scare I say the first thing I think. I ask him for a job.

"He is very kind. He say: 'Certainly we will find you work. What can you do?'

"I say I am a good laundress, or a cook, or a nurse. We talk some more. He is still kind. He ask me how long I been in Winnipeg, and where I work and all. Always I am too scare to say in that fine room: 'I am your daughter.'

"At last he say: 'Well, come back to-morrow, and I'll see what I can do.' Then I start to go, and he say: 'Wait a minute.' He get up and come around the desk, his eyes go bad----"

She paused. Ralph's heart beat thickly with a horrible premonition.

"I run out of the house," Nahnya faltered. "I never tell him. I never see him again!"

X

MOONLIGHT

Ralph lay under a blanket roof staring at the fire. Sleep was banished to the other side of the world from his eyelids. 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 skull, 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 sanctuary; 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 persecuted.

"Oh, heaven! what a shame!" he cried, with a heart wrung with rage and compassion. "And I can do nothing to square it! O God! how noble she is! And how beautiful!"

Beauty seemed of lesser moment to him now. His soul prostrated 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 tormented 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 prone 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 reassure 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 silhouetted against it, the outline faintly luminous. Ralph was struck by its likeness to a titanic thumb; the thumb of the Earth Maker, 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 ramp of heaven, like a lady wan with a sorrow bravely borne--like Nahnya.

Her light descended into the valley with ineffable 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 tilted silver chalice held aloft.

Only to those whose hearts have become prescient through suffering does the moon fully reveal herself. Ralph with a catch of the breath beheld her for the first. The soft potency of her beauty drew him out from under his blanket to stand upright in the purifying rays. His pain was at the same time soothed and deepened, like a tearing rapid received into still water below. The ugly, nagging thoughts that throng upon the agitation of wakefulness were exorcized, and the great matter stood out clear.

"I love her!" Ralph silently vowed to the moon. "Please God I'll make myself worthy 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 crest. Everything in him was changed, he felt. All his life up to this moment had been a sordid 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 weird, pale loveliness up there. Behind him the mountains to the west were fully revealed. Withdrawn and misty 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 haze of his dreams he became aware that there were only two canoes below instead of the three that belonged there. When the fact fully penetrated his understanding, his heart bounded in his breast. Was it possible that Nahnya----! He knew that, like himself, she had no love for a sleepless 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 embarked.

He found her. Half a mile up the lake, out in the middle, she was resting on her paddle, woman and canoe making a graceful 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 softened her, too. Seeing her so still and lovely, his heart swelled in his breast, throttling 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 spoke 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 blotted out unessential detail in order to reveal in dim, suggestive lights and shadows the very spirit of beauty dwelling there. Ralph thought he had already encompassed 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 desperately.

"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 suffocated 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 infinitely worse to her than the silence. "Don't talk! Don't talk!" she murmured in a voice sharp with apprehension. "It hurts me!"

Ralph's bursting heart having found an outlet was not to be stopped. "I love you!" he said.

A queer little cry escaped her. She instinctively 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 imploringly. "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 distress 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 relentlessly. "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 passionately. "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 faculties 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 garish. 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 automaton. "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."

XI

THE DEPARTURE FROM THE VALLEY

Ralph wished to leave the valley by himself. After what had happened, to be with Nahnya night and day without ever meeting her eyes, or exchanging a word beyond what the business of camp made necessary, seemed like the very refinement of torture. But there was no help for it. It was too hard to go back upstream, Nahnya said; they must go out a different way, and she must show him.

She took Charley, which made it easier. They set off next morning. In his instinct to conceal pain, Ralph was as much an Indian as any of them. No one could have guessed from his composed face what had happened. Such natures consume themselves inwardly. He was scarcely conscious of what was taking place outside him.

Charley was nothing loath at the prospect of another journey. Little by little the Indian boy had come to be at his ease with Ralph. His stolidity, it appeared, was largely an affectation for the purpose of impressing white strangers. He now talked freely to Ralph in a queer jargon of English and Cree of what interested him, hunting and animals and making trips. St. Jean Bateese, too, who accompanied them to the mouth of the cave, stuck close to Ralph's side, and betrayed an unaffected regret at his going away.

"I can win them all but her," thought Ralph bitterly.

Before the cave swallowed him, Ralph looked for the last time at the lake with its sheen like a peacock's breast; at the kingly mountains drenched with sunshine, and at the mad, green meadows with their white-stemmed birches. "I leave myself here," he thought. He grimly clenched the stem of his pipe between his teeth.

During the long traverse under the mountain, Ralph spoke but once. Passing the scarecrow, he asked why it had been set up there. Charley explained that it was to keep the animals out. The man-smell which clung to his clothes was sufficient.

On the site of their last camp in the great forest they spelled for a meal. Afterward Nahnya brought the handkerchief to Ralph with a deprecating air.

"That's ridiculous now," cried Ralph, turning red. "I won't be carried down like a cripple!"

Nahnya, not looking at him, asked quietly: "You promise never to come this way again?"

"No!" said Ralph instantly. He could not have told why the word sprang from his lips. Perhaps it was that hope cannot be killed dead in a lover's heart while it beats.

The bandage was put on. Upon Ralph's promise not to disturb it, they refrained from binding his arms. And so after all he was carried down, chafing all the way. An instinct of caution kept him from telling them he knew he could find his way back anyway if he chose.

Carrying him downhill was comparatively easy. When they halted at last and the bandage was removed, Ralph found they were still immured in the forest, but from a murmur of the rapids that reached his ears, he knew they had come almost to the river.

"We will travel all night," Nahnya said, "so you not have your eyes blinded. Better sleep now."

He did sleep. He had had none the night before.

They awoke him to eat. Once more the bandage was put on, and he was carried, but only for a little way. They came out beside the river, and he was laid on the flat rock. He heard them launch the boat, and stow their baggage. Then he was laid on the blankets and they pushed off.

Ralph had supposed they would go back at least part of the way they had come. His surprise was therefore great when he heard the roar of the rapids growing closer, and realized they were going on down. His hand instinctively shot to the bandage over his eyes. Remembering in time that he had given his word, he clenched it instead, and ground his teeth.

Nahnya, understanding something of what was passing through his mind, said: "This is an easy rapid. I know all the rocks in it."

There was the same breathless pause while the whole firmament was filled with the roaring of the waters; the startling plunge and mad leaping below; the same sudden subsidence into an unnatural calm. It was like dreaming of falling over a precipice. From the quickness with which the roar dulled to a murmur behind them Ralph realized they were carried down at an astonishing speed. He wondered grimly if ever before a blind man had been taken down great rapids in a crazy dugout.

Some time later Nahnya leaned over and took the bandage from around his head. It was dark, or nearly so. At first he saw only towering mountain masses on either hand, and overhead the stars beginning to come out. Sitting up, he was amazed at the metamorphosis of the river. It was the ragged, violent Rice River when he had seen it last. Here was a volume and majesty that stream had never suggested. In mere size it was trebled, and its banks were flung up to the stars. The overwhelming shadow mountains seemed to be drawing back courteously to allow the mighty stream to pass. To see such a place for the first at night, added to its majesty. Ralph was dimly conscious that he was beholding one of the great sights of earth.