Читать книгу: «The Bridge of the Gods», страница 12

CHAPTER VIII
IN THE DARK

 
There is not one upon life’s weariest way,
Who is weary as I am weary of all but death.
 

Swinburne.

The grim sentinels by the pathway, who had been so reluctant to let Cecil pass the day before, were still more reluctant this evening. One of them planted himself in the trail directly in front of Cecil, and did not offer to let him go on, but stood sullenly blocking the way. Cecil touched the warrior’s arm and bade him stand aside. For an instant it seemed that he would refuse, but his superstitious respect for the white tomanowos overcame his obstinacy, – and he stepped unwillingly back.

But as Cecil went on he felt, and felt rightly, that they would not let him pass again, – that the last act, be it what it might, in his love drama, was drawing to a close.

A few moments’ walk, and he saw in the dark the little figure awaiting him under the trees. She came slowly forward to meet him. He saw that her face was very pale, her eyes large and full of woe. She gave him her hands; they felt like ice. He bent over her and kissed her with quivering lips.

“Poor child,” he said, putting his arms around her slender form and drawing it close in his embrace, “how can I ever tell you what I have to tell you to-night!”

She did not respond to his caress. At length, looking up in a lifeless, stricken way, she spoke in a mechanical voice, a voice that did not sound like her own, —

“I know it already. My father came and told me that to-morrow I must – ” She shuddered; her voice broke; then she threw her arms around his neck and clung to him passionately. “But they can never tear me away from you; never, never!”

How could he tell her that he came to put her away from him, that he came to bid her farewell? He clasped her the tighter in his arms. For an instant his mind swept all the chances of flight with her, only to realize their utter hopelessness; then he remembered that even to think of such a thing was treachery to the resolves he had just made. He shook from head to foot with stormy emotion.

She lifted her head from his breast, where it was pillowed.

“Let us get horses or a canoe, and fly to-night to the desert or the sea, – anywhere, anywhere, only to be away from here! Let us take the trail you came on, and find our way to your people.”

“Alas,” replied Cecil, “how could we escape? Every tribe, far and near, is tributary to your father. The runners would rouse them as soon as we were missed. The swiftest riders would be on our trail; ambuscades would lurk for us in every thicket; we could never escape; and even if we should, a whole continent swarming with wild tribes lies between us and my land.”

She looked at him in anguish, with dim eyes, and her arms slipped from around his neck.

“Do you no longer love Wallulah? Something tells me that you would not wish to fly with me, even if we could escape. There is something you have not told me.”

Clasping her closely to him, he told her how he felt it was the will of God that they must part. God had sent him on a sacred mission, and he dared not turn aside. Either her love or the redemption of the tribes of the Wauna must be given up; and for their sake love must be sacrificed.

“To-day God took away the words from my lips and the spirit from my heart. My soul was lead. I felt like one accursed. Then it came to me that it was because I turned aside from my mission to love you. We must part. Our ways diverge. I must walk my own pathway alone wheresoever it leads me. God commands, and I must obey.”

The old rapt look came back, the old set, determined expression which showed that that delicate organization could grow as strong as granite in its power to endure.

Wallulah shrank away from him, and strove to free herself from his embrace.

“Let me go,” she said, in a low, stifled tone. “Oh, if I could only die!”

But he held her close, almost crushing the delicate form against his breast. She felt his heart beat deeply and painfully against her own, and in some way it came to her that every throb was agony, that he was in the extremity of mental and physical suffering.

“God help me!” he said; “how can I give you up?”

She realized by woman’s intuition that his whole soul was wrung with pain, with an agony darker and bitterer than her own; and the exceeding greatness of his suffering gave her strength. A sudden revulsion of feeling affected her. She looked up at him with infinite tenderness.

“I wish I could take all the pain away from you and bear it myself.”

“It is God’s will; we must submit to it.”

“His will!” Her voice was full of rebellion. “Why does he give us such bitter suffering? Doesn’t he care? I thought once that God was good, but it is all dark now.”

“Hush, you must not think so. After all, it will be only a little while till we meet in heaven, and there no one can take you from me.”

“Heaven is so far off. The present is all that I can see, and it is as black as death. Death! it would be sweet to die now with your arms around me; but to live year after year with him! How can I go to him, now that I have known you? How can I bear his presence, his touch?”

She shuddered there in Cecil’s arms. All her being shrunk in repugnance at the thought of Snoqualmie.

“Thank God for death!” said Cecil, brokenly.

“It is so long to wait,” she murmured, “and I am so young and strong.”

His kisses fell on cheek and brow. She drew down his head and put her cheek against his and clung to him as if she would never let him go.

It was a strange scene, the mournful parting of the lovers in the gloom of the forest and the night. To the east, through the black net-work of leaves and branches, a dull red glow marked the crater of Mount Hood, and its intermittent roar came to them through the silence. It was a night of mystery and horror, – a fitting night for their tragedy of love and woe. The gloom and terror of their surroundings seemed to throw a supernatural shadow over their farewell.

“The burning mountain is angry to-night,” said Wallulah, at last. “Would that it might cover us up with its ashes and stones, as the Indians say it once did two lovers back in the old time.”

“Alas, death never comes to those who wish for it. When the grace and sweetness are all fled from our lives, and we would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at rest, then it is that we must go on living. Now I must go. The longer we delay our parting the harder it will be.”

“Not yet, not yet!” cried Wallulah. “Think how long I must be alone, – always alone until I die.”

“God help us!” said Cecil, setting his teeth. “I will dash my mission to the winds and fly with you. What if God does forsake us, and our souls are lost! I would rather be in the outer darkness with you than in heaven without you.”

His resolution had given way at last. But in such cases, is it not always the woman that is strongest?

“No,” she said, “you told me that your God would forsake you if you did. It must not be.”

She withdrew herself from his arms and stood looking at him. He saw in the moonlight that her pale tear-stained face had upon it a sorrowful resignation, a mournful strength, born of very hopelessness.

“God keep you, Wallulah!” murmured Cecil, brokenly. “If I could only feel that he would shelter and shield you!”

“That may be as it will,” replied the sweet, patient lips. “I do not know. I shut my eyes to the future. I only want to take myself away from you, so that your God will not be angry with you. Up there,” she said, pointing, “I will meet you sometime and be with you forever. God will not be angry then. Now farewell.”

He advanced with outstretched arms. She motioned him back.

“It will make it harder,” she said.

For a moment she looked into his eyes, her own dark, dilated, full of love and sadness; for a moment all that was within him thrilled to the passionate, yearning tenderness of her gaze; then she turned and went away without a word.

He could not bear to see her go, and yet he knew it must end thus; he dared not follow her or call her back. But so intense was his desire for her to return, so vehemently did his life cry out after her, that for an instant it seemed to him he had called out, “Come back! come back!” The cry rose to his lips; but he set his teeth and held it back. They must part; was it not God’s will? The old pain at his heart returned, a faintness was on him, and he reeled to the ground.

Could it be that her spirit felt that unuttered cry, and that it brought her back? Be this as it may, while he was recovering from his deadly swoon he dimly felt her presence beside him, and the soft cool touch of her fingers on his brow. Then – or did he imagine it? – her lips, cold as those of the dead, touched his own. But when consciousness entirely returned, he was alone in the forest.

Blind, dizzy, staggering with weakness, he found his way to the camp. Suddenly, as he drew near it he felt the earth sway and move beneath him like a living thing. He caught hold of a tree to escape being thrown to the ground. There came an awful burst of flame from Mount Hood. Burning cinders and scoria lit up the eastern horizon like a fountain of fire. Then down from the great canyon of the Columbia, from the heart of the Cascade Range, broke a mighty thundering sound, as if half a mountain had fallen. Drowning for a moment the roar of the volcano, the deep echo rolled from crag to crag, from hill to hill. A wild chorus of outcries rang from the startled camp, – the fierce, wild cry of many tribes mad with fear yet breathing forth tremulous defiance, the cry of human dread mingling with the last echoes of that mysterious crash.

CHAPTER IX
QUESTIONING THE DEAD

 
Then he said: “Cold lips and breast without breath,
Is there no voice, no language of death?”
 

Edwin Arnold.

While Cecil was on his way that evening to seek Wallulah, a canoe with but a single occupant was dropping down the Columbia toward one of the many mimaluse, or death-islands, that are washed by its waters.

An Indian is always stealthy, but there was an almost more than Indian stealthiness about this canoe-man’s movements. Noiselessly, as the twilight deepened into darkness, the canoe glided out of a secluded cove not far from the camp; noiselessly the paddle dipped into the water, and the canoe passed like a shadow into the night.

On the rocky mimaluse island, some distance below the mouth of the Willamette, the Indian landed and drew his boat up on the beach. He looked around for a moment, glanced at the red glow that lit the far-off crest of Mount Hood, then turned and went up the pathway to the ancient burial hut.

Who was it that had dared to visit the island of the dead after dark? The bravest warriors were not capable of such temerity. Old men told how, away back in the past, some braves had ventured upon the island after nightfall, and had paid the awful forfeit. They were struck by unseen hands. Weapons that had lain for years beside the decaying corpses of forgotten warriors wounded them in the dark. Fleeing to their canoes in swiftest fear, they found the shadowy pursuit was swifter still, and were overtaken and struck down, while the whole island rung with mocking laughter. One only escaped, plunging all torn and bruised into the river and swimming to the farther shore. When he looked back, the island was covered with moving lights, and the shrill echo of fiendish mirth came to him across the water. His companions were never seen again. A little while afterward the dogs barked all night around his lodge, and in the morning he was found lying dead upon his couch, his face ghastly and drawn with fear, as if at some frightful apparition.

“He disturbed the mimaluse tillicums [dead people], and they came for him,” said the old medicine men, as they looked at him.

Since then, no one had been on the island except in the daytime. Little bands of mourners had brought hither the swathed bodies of their dead, laid them in the burial hut, lifted the wail over them, and left upon the first approach of evening.

Who, then, was this, – the first for generations to set foot on the mimaluse illahee after dark?

It could be but one, the only one among all the tribes who would have dared to come, and to come alone, – Multnomah, the war-chief, who knew not what it was to fear the living or the dead.

Startled by the outburst of the great smoking mountains, which always presaged woe to the Willamettes, perplexed by Tohomish’s mysterious hints of some impending calamity, weighed down by a dread presentiment, he came that night on a strange and superstitious errand.

On the upper part of the island, above reach of high water, the burial hut loomed dark and still in the moonlight as the chief approached it.

Some of the Willamettes, like the Chinooks, practised canoe burial, but the greater part laid their dead in huts, as did also the Klickitats and the Cascades.

The war-chief entered the hut. The rude boards that covered the roof were broken and decayed. The moonlight shone through many openings, lighting up the interior with a dim and ghostly radiance. There, swathed in crumbling cerements, ghastly in shrunken flesh and protruding bone, lay the dead of the line of Multnomah, – the chiefs of the blood royal who had ruled the Willamettes for many generations. The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children of the ancient race. The warrior’s bow lay beside him with rotting string; the child’s playthings were still clasped in fleshless fingers; beside the squaw’s skull the ear-pendants of hiagua shells lay where they had fallen from the crumbling flesh years before.

Near the door, and where the slanting moonbeams fell full upon it, was the last who had been borne to the death hut, the mother of Wallulah. Six years before Multnomah had brought her body, – brought it alone, with no eye to behold his grief; and since then no human tread had disturbed the royal burial-place.

He came now and looked down upon the body. It had been tightly swathed, fold upon fold, in some oriental fabric; and the wrappings, stiffened by time still showed what had once been a rare symmetry of form. The face was covered with a linen cloth, yellow now through age and fitting like a mask to the features. The chief knelt down and drew away the face-cloth. The countenance, though shrunken, was almost perfectly preserved. Indeed, so well preserved were many of the corpses the first white settlers found on these mimaluse islands as to cause at one time a belief that the Indians had some secret process of embalming their dead. There was no such process, however, – nothing save the antiseptic properties of the ocean breeze which daily fanned the burial islands of the lower Columbia.

Lovely indeed must the mother of Wallulah have been in her life. Withered as her features were, there was a delicate beauty in them still, – in the graceful brow, the regular profile, the exquisitely chiselled chin. Around the shoulders and the small shapely head her hair had grown in rich luxuriant masses.

The chief gazed long on the shrunken yet beautiful face. His iron features grew soft, as none but Wallulah had ever seen them grow. He touched gently the hair of his dead wife, and put it back from her brow with a wistful, caressing tenderness. He had never understood her; she had always been a mystery to him; the harsh savagery of his nature had never been able to enter into or comprehend the refined grace of hers; but he had loved her with all the fierce, tenacious, secretive power of his being, a power that neither time nor death could change. Now he spoke to her, his low tones sounding weird in that house of the dead, – a strange place for words of love.

“My woman, – mine yet, for death itself cannot take from Multnomah that which is his own; my bird that came from the sea and made its nest for a little while in the heart of Multnomah and then flew away and left it empty, – I have been hungry to see you, to touch your hair and look upon your face again. Now I am here, and it is sweet to be with you, but the heart of Multnomah listens to hear you speak.”

He still went on stroking her hair softly, reverently. It seemed the only caress of which he was capable, but it had in it a stern and mournful tenderness.

“Speak to me! The dead talk to the tomanowos men and the dreamers. You are mine; talk to me; I am in need. The shadow of something terrible to come is over the Willamette. The smoking mountains are angry; the dreamers see only bad signs; there are black things before Multnomah, and he cannot see what they are. Tell me, – the dead are wise and know that which comes, – what is this unknown evil which threatens me and mine?”

He looked down at her with intense craving, intense desire, as if his imperious will could reanimate that silent clay and force to the mute lips the words he so desired. But the still lips moved not, and the face lay cold under his burning and commanding gaze. The chief leaned closer over her; he called her name aloud, – something that the Willamette Indians rarely did, for they believed that if the names of the dead were spoken, even in conversation, it would bring them back; so they alluded to their lost ones only indirectly, and always reluctantly and with fear.

“Come back!” said he, repeating the name he had not spoken for six years. “You are my own, you are my woman. Hear me, speak to me, you whom I love; you who, living or dead, are still the wife of Multnomah.”

No expression flitted over the changeless calm of the face beneath him: no sound came back to his straining ears except the low intermittent roar of the far-off volcano.

A sorrowful look crossed his face. As has been said, there was an indefinable something always between them, which perhaps must ever be between those of diverse race. It had been the one mystery that puzzled him while she was living, and it seemed to glide, viewless yet impenetrable, between them now. He rose to his feet.

“It comes between us again,” he thought, looking down at her mournfully. “It pushed me back when she was living, and made me feel that I stood outside her heart even while my arms were around her. It comes between us now and will not let her speak. If it was only something I could see and grapple with!”

And the fierce warrior felt his blood kindle within him, that not only death but something still more mysterious and incomprehensible should separate him from the one he loved. He turned sadly away and passed on to the interior of the hut. As he gazed on the crumbling relics of humanity around him, the wonted look of command came back to his brow. These should obey; by iron strength of will and mystic charm he would sway them to his bidding. The withered lips of death, or spirit voices, should tell him what he wished to know. Abjectly superstitious as was the idea it involved, there was yet something grand in his savage despotic grasp after power that, dominating all he knew of earth, sought to bend to his will even the spirit-land.

The chief believed that the departed could talk to him if they would; for did they not talk to the medicine men and the dreamers? If so, why not to him, the great chief, the master of all the tribes of the Wauna?

He knelt down, and began to sway his body back and forth after the manner of the Nootka shamans, and to chant a long, low, monotonous song, in which the names of the dead who lay there were repeated over and over again.

“Kamyah, Tlesco, Che-aqah, come back! come back and tell me the secret, the black secret, the death secret, the woe that is to come. Winelah, Sic-mish, Tlaquatin, the land is dark with signs and omens; the hearts of men are heavy with dread; the dreamers say that the end is come for Multnomah and his race. Is it true? Come and tell me. I wait, I listen, I speak your names; come back, come back!”

Tohomish himself would not have dared to repeat those names in the charnel hut, lest those whom he invoked should spring upon him and tear him to pieces. No more potent or more perilous charm was known to the Indians.

Ever as Multnomah chanted, the sullen roar of the volcano came like an undertone and filled the pauses of the wild incantation. And as he went on, it seemed to the chief that the air grew thick with ghostly presences. There was a sense of breathing life all around him. He felt that others, many others, were with him; yet he saw nothing. When he paused for some voice, some whisper of reply, this sense of hyper-physical perception became so acute that he could almost see, almost hear, in the thick blackness and the silence; yet no answer came.

Again he resumed his mystic incantation, putting all the force of his nature into the effort, until it seemed that even those shadowy things of the night must yield to his blended entreaty and command. But there came no response. Thick and thronging the viewless presences seemed to gather, to look, and to listen; but no reply came to his ears, and no sight met his eyes save the swathed corpses and the white-gleaming bones on which the shifting moonbeams fell.

Multnomah rose to his feet, baffled, thwarted, all his soul glowing with anger that he should be so scorned.

“Why is this?” said his stern voice in the silence. “You come, but you give no reply; you look, you listen, but you make no sound. Answer me, you who know the future; tell me this secret!”

Still no response. Yet the air seemed full of dense, magnetic life, of muffled heart-beats, of voiceless, unresponsive, uncommunicative forms that he could almost touch.

For perhaps the first time in his life the war-chief found himself set at naught. His form grew erect; his eyes gleamed with the terrible wrath which the tribes dreaded as they dreaded the wrath of the Great Spirit.

“Do you mock Multnomah? Am I not war-chief of the Willamettes? Though you dwell in shadow and your bodies are dust, you are Willamettes, and I am still your chief. Give up your secret! If the Great Spirit has sealed your lips so that you cannot speak, give me a sign that will tell me. Answer by word or sign; I say it, – I, Multnomah, your chief and master.”

Silence again. The roar of the volcano had ceased; and an ominous stillness brooded over Nature, as if all things held their breath, anticipating some mighty and imminent catastrophe. Multnomah’s hands were clinched, and his strong face had on it now a fierceness of command that no eye had ever seen before. His indomitable will reached out to lay hold of those unseen presences and compel them to reply.

A moment of strained, commanding expectation: then the answer came; the sign was given. The earth shook beneath him till he staggered, almost fell; the hut creaked and swayed like a storm-driven wreck; and through the crevices on the side toward Mount Hood came a blinding burst of flame. Down from the great gap in the Cascade Range through which flows the Columbia rolled the far-off thundering crash which had so startled Cecil and appalled the tribes. Then, tenfold louder than before, came again the roar of the volcano.

Too well Multnomah knew what had gone down in that crash; too well did he read the sign that had been given. For a moment it seemed as if all the strength of his heart had broken with that which had fallen; then the proud dignity of his character reasserted itself, even in the face of doom.

“It has come at last, as the wise men of old said it would. The end is at hand; the Willamettes pass like a shadow from the earth. The Great Spirit has forsaken us, our tomanowos has failed us. But my own heart fails me not, and my own arm is strong. Like a war-chief will I meet that which is to come. Multnomah falls, but he falls as the Bridge has fallen, with a crash that will shake the earth, with a ruin that shall crush all beneath him even as he goes down.”

Turning away, his eyes fell on the body of his wife as he passed toward the door. Aroused and desperate as he was, he stopped an instant and looked down at her with a long, lingering look, a look that seemed to say, “I shall meet you ere many suns. Death and ruin but give you back to me the sooner. There will be nothing between us then; I shall understand you at last.”

Then he drew his robe close around him, and went out into the night.