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She seated herself, and her father stood beside her with an abstracted gaze, his hand stroking her long, soft tresses. He was thinking of the darker, richer tresses of another, whose proud, sad face and mournful eyes with their wistful meaning, so like Wallulah's own, he, a barbarian prince, could never understand.
"I will go and see her. I will, without letting her know that I love her, give her to understand my position and her own. She shall see how impossible it is for us ever to be aught to each other. And I shall urge her to cling to God and walk in the path he has appointed for her, while I go on in mine." So thinking, he left his lodge that evening and took the path to Wallulah's home.
The grand, strong face only grew grander, stronger, as the shadows darkened around him; the unconquerable will only grew the fiercer and the more unflinching. But ere the moon that shone first on Wallulah's new-made cairn had rounded to the full, there was that upon him before which even his will bowed and gave way, death, swift and mysterious. And it came in this wise.
She had died three years before the events we have been narrating, and had left to her daughter the heritage of her refinement and her beauty. Wallulah was the only child of the war-chief and his Asiatic wife, the sole heir of her father's sovereignty. Two miles from the council grove, in the interior of the island, was Wallulah's lodge.
He felt that he was doing wrong, yet so sweet was it to be in her presence, so much did her beauty fill the mighty craving of his nature, that it was not possible for him to tear himself away. Some fifteen minutes' walk brought them to Wallulah's lodge.
Multnomah was the richest of all the Indians of the Wauna; and the gifts displayed were the spoil of many wars, treasures garnered during forty years of sovereignty. And now they were all given away. The chief kept back nothing, except some cases of oriental fabrics that had been saved from the wreck when Wallulah's mother was cast upon the shore.
At length, when evening came and the shadow of the wood fell long and cool, the burials began. A shallow grave was scooped at Wallulah's feet for the bodies of the two canoe-men. Then chiefs for they only might bury Multnomah's daughter entombed her in a cairn; being Upper Columbia Indians, they buried her, after the manner of their people, under a heap of stone.
I will be faithful. I will never look upon her face again!" He emerged from the wood into the camp; its multitudinous sounds were all around him, and never had the coarseness and savagery of Indian life seemed so repellent as now, when he came back to it with his mind full of Wallulah's grace and loveliness. It was harsh discord after music.
Cecil's dazzled eyes wandered over all this splendor, then came back to Wallulah's face again. "I have seen nothing like this in my own land, not even in the King's palace. How came such beautiful things here among the Indians?" "They were saved from the vessel that was wrecked. They were my mother's, and she had them arranged thus. This was her lodge. It is mine now.
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