"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.