As she ended her melancholy strain, she turned from the spot where the increasing fury of the storm made it no longer possible for her to stand, and turning, met the gaze of the stranger fixed on her. A suffusion, the most rich and vivid, mantled over her from brow to bosom; she did not utter her usual exclamation of joy at his sight, but, with averted eyes and faltering step, followed him as he pointed her to seek shelter amid the ruins of the pagoda. They approached it in silence; and, amid the convulsions and fury of nature, it was singular to see two beings walk on together without exchanging a word of apprehension, or feeling a thought of danger—the one armed by despair, the other by innocence. Immalee would rather have sought the shelter of her favourite banyan-tree, but the stranger tried to make her comprehend, that her danger would be much greater there than in the spot he pointed out to her.
“Danger!” said the Indian, while a bright and wild smile irradiated her features; “can there be danger when you are near me?”
“Is there, then, no danger in my presence?—few have met me without dreading, and without feeling it too!” and his countenance, as he spoke, grew darker than the heaven at which he scowled. “Immalee,” he added, in a voice still deeper and more thrilling, from the unwonted operation of human emotion in its tones; “Immalee, you cannot be weak enough to believe that I have power of controlling the elements? If I had,” he continued, “by the heaven that is frowning at me, the first exertion of my power should be to collect the most swift and deadly of the lightnings that are hissing around us, and transfix you where you stand!”
“Me?” repeated the trembling Indian, her cheek growing paler at his words, and the voice in which they were uttered, than at the redoubling fury of the storm, amid whose pauses she scarce heard them.
“Yes—you—you—lovely as you are, and innocent, and pure, before a fire more deadly consumes your existence, and drinks your heart-blood—before you are longer exposed to a danger a thousand times more fatal than those with which the elements menace you—the danger of my accursed and miserable presence!”
Immalee, unconscious of his meaning, but trembling with impassioned grief at the agitation with which he spoke, approached him to soothe the emotion of which she knew neither the name or the cause. Through the fractures of the ruin the red and ragged lightnings disclosed, from time to time, a glimpse of her figure—her dishevelled hair—her pallid and appealing look—her locked hands, and the imploring bend of her slight form, as if she was asking pardon for a crime of which she was unconscious—and soliciting an interest in griefs not her own. All around her wild, unearthly, and terrible—the floor strewed with fragments of stone, and mounds of sand—the vast masses of ruined architecture, whose formation seemed the work of no human hand, and whose destruction appeared the sport of demons—the yawning fissures of the arched and ponderous roof, through which heaven darkened and blazed alternately with a gloom that wrapped everything, or a light more fearful than that gloom.—All around her gave to her form, when it was momently visible, a relief so strong and so touching, that it might have immortalized the hand who had sketched her as the embodied presence of an angel who had descended to the regions of woe and wrath—of darkness and of fire, on a message of reconciliation—and descended in vain.
The stranger threw on her, as she bent before him, one of those looks that, but her own, no mortal eye had yet encountered unappalled. Its expression seemed only to inspire a higher feeling of devotedness in the victim. Perhaps an involuntary sentiment of terror mingled itself with that expression, as this beautiful being sunk on her knees before her writhing and distracted enemy; and, by the silent supplication of her attitude, seemed to implore him to have mercy on himself. As the lightnings flashed around her—as the earth trembled beneath her white and slender feet—as the elements seemed all sworn to the destruction of every living thing, and marched on from heaven to the accomplishment of their purpose, with “Vae victis” written and legible to every eye, in the broad unfolded banners of that resplendent and sulphurous light that seemed to display the “day of hell”—the feelings of the devoted Indian seemed concentrated on the ill-chosen object of their idolatry alone. Her graduating attitudes beautifully, but painfully, expressed the submission of a female heart devoted to its object, to his frailties, his passions, and his very crimes. When subdued by the image of power, which the mind of man exercises over that of woman, that impulse becomes irresistibly humiliating. Immalee had at first bowed to conciliate her beloved, and her spirit had taught her frame that first inclination. In her next stage of suffering, she had sunk on her knees, and, remaining at a distance from him, she had trusted to this state of prostration to produce that effect on his heart which those who love always hope compassion may produce—that illegitimate child of love, often more cherished than its parent. In her last efforts she clung to his hand—she pressed her pale lips to it, and was about to utter a few words—her voice failed her, but her fast dropping tears spoke to the hand which she held—and its grasp, which for a moment convulsively returned hers, and then flung it away, answered her.
The Indian remained prostrate and aghast. “Immalee,” said the stranger, in a struggling voice, “Do you wish me to tell you the feelings with which my presence should inspire
