"My father!"
"Do not attempt to exculpate yourself, child," the old man said, with a shade of bitterness. "I should have expected what now happens, ingratitude and egotism are deposited in man's heart by Providence, as his safeguard. Without those two supreme virtues of humanity, no society would be possible. I am not angry with you; I have no right to be so; and, as the sage says, you are a man, and no human feeling must be alien to you."
"I make neither plaint nor recrimination, my father; I know that you have acted towards me with good intentions," the Chief replied, "but, unfortunately, your lessons have produced a very different result from what you awaited: in developing my ideas, you have, without your knowledge or mine, increased my wants; the life I lead preys upon me: the men who surround me are a burden to me, because they cannot understand me, and I can no longer understand them. As respects myself, my mind rushes towards an unknown horizon. I dream wide awake of strange and impossible things. I suffer from an incurable malady, and cannot define it. I hopelessly love a woman, of whom I am jealous, and who can never be mine, save by a crime. Oh, my father, I am very wretched!"
"Child!" the old man exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders in pity. "What, you are unhappy! Your grief inclines me to laughter. Man has in himself the germ of good and evil; if you suffer, you have only yourself to blame. You are young, intelligent, powerful, the first of your nation: what do you want for happiness? Nothing. If you wish to be so permanently, stifle in your heart that insensate passion which devours it, and follow, without looking to the right or left, the glorious mission you have traced for yourself. What can be more noble or grander than the deliverance and regeneration of a people?"
"Alas! can I do it?"
"What! you doubt?" the old man shouted, striking the table with his fist and looking him in the face; "then you are lost: renounce your plans, you will not succeed; on a road like that you follow, hesitation or stoppage is ruin."
"Father!"
"Silence," he said, with redoubled energy, "and listen to me; when you first revealed your plans to me, I tried by all arguments possible to make you abandon them. I proved to you that your resolves were premature. That the Indians, brutalized by a lengthened slavery, were only the shadow of their former selves; and that to attempt to arouse in them any noble or generous feeling was like galvanizing a corpse. You resisted; you would hear nothing; you went Headlong into intrigues and plots of every description—is it not so?"
"It is true."
"Well! now it is too late to return; you must go on at all risks. You may fall, but you will do so with honour; and your name, cherished by all, will swell the martyrology of the chosen men who have devoted themselves to their country."