“No—no—no!” said the Indian, applying her white and delicate hands to her ears, and then clasping them on her bosom; “I feel them too much.”
“Hate me—curse me!” said the stranger, not heeding her, and stamping till the reverberation of his steps on the hollow and loosened stones almost contended with the thunder; “hate me, for I hate you—I hate all things that live—all things that are dead—I am myself hated and hateful!”
“Not by me,” said the poor Indian, feeling, through the blindness of her tears, for his averted hand.
“Yes, by you, if you knew whose I am, and whom I serve.”
Immalee aroused her newly-excited energies of heart and intellect to answer this appeal. “Who you are, I know not—but I am yours.—Whom you serve, I know not—but him will I serve—I will be yours forever. Forsake me if you will, but when I am dead, come back to this isle, and say to yourself, The roses have bloomed and faded—the streams have flowed and been dried up—the rocks have been removed from their places—and the lights of heaven have altered in their courses—but there was one who never changed, and she is not here!”
As she spoke the enthusiasm of passion struggling with grief, she added, “You have told me you possess the happy art of writing thought.—Do not write one thought on my grave, for one word traced by your hand would revive me. Do not weep, for one tear would make me live again, perhaps to draw a tear from you.”
“Immalee!” said the stranger. The Indian looked up, and, with a mingled feeling of grief, amazement, and compunction, beheld him shed tears. The next moment he dashed them away with the hand of despair; and, grinding his teeth, burst into that wild shriek of bitter and convulsive laughter that announces the object of its derision is ourselves.
Immalee, whose feelings were almost exhausted, trembled in silence at his feet.
“Hear me, wretched girl!” he cried in tones that seemed alternately tremulous with malignity and compassion, with habitual hostility and involuntary softness; “hear me! I know the secret sentiment you struggle with better than the innocent heart of which it is the inmate knows it. Suppress, banish, destroy it. Crush it as you would a young reptile before its growth had made it loathsome to the eye, and poisonous to existence!”
“I never crushed even a reptile in my life,” answered Immalee, unconscious that this matter-of-fact answer was equally applicable in another sense.
“You love, then,” said the stranger; “but,” after a long and ominous pause, “do you know whom it is you love?”
“You!” said the Indian, with that purity of truth that consecrates the impulse it yields to, and would blush more for the sophistications of art than the confidence of nature; “you! You have taught me to think, to feel, and to weep.”
“And you love me for this?” said her companion, with an expression half irony, half commiseration. “Think, Immalee, for a moment, how unsuitable, how unworthy, is the object of the feelings you lavish on him. A being unattractive in his form, repulsive in his habits, separated from life and humanity by a gulf impassable; a disinherited child of nature, who goes about to curse or to tempt his more prosperous brethren; one who—what withholds me from disclosing all?”
At this moment a flash of such vivid and terrific brightness as no human sight could sustain, gleamed through the ruins, pouring through every fissure instant and intolerable light. Immalee, overcome by terror and emotion, remained on her knees, her hands closely clasped over her aching eyes.
For a few moments that she remained thus, she thought she heard other sounds near her, and that the stranger was answering a voice that spoke to him. She heard him say, as the thunder rolled to a distance, “This hour is mine, not thine—begone, and trouble me not.” When she looked up again, all trace of human emotion was gone from his expression. The dry and burning eye of despair that he fixed on her, seemed never to have owned a tear; the hand with which he grasped her, seemed never to have felt the flow of blood, or the throb of a pulse; amid the intense and increasing heat of an atmosphere that appeared on fire, its touch was as cold as that of the dead.
“Mercy!” cried the trembling Indian, as she in vain endeavoured to read a human feeling in those eyes of stone, to which her own tearful and appealing ones were uplifted—“mercy!” And while she uttered the word, she knew not what she deprecated or dreaded.
The stranger answered not a word, relaxed not a muscle; it seemed as if he felt her not with the hands that grasped her—as if he saw her not with the eyes that glared fixedly and coldly on her. He bore, or rather dragged, her to the vast arch that had once been the entrance to the pagoda, but which, now shattered and ruinous, resembled more the gulfing yawn of a cavern that harbours the inmates of the desert, than a work wrought by the hands of man, and devoted to the worship of a deity. “You have called for mercy,” said her companion, in a voice that froze her blood even under the burning atmosphere, whose air she could scarce respire. “You have cried for mercy, and mercy you shall have. Mercy has not been dealt to me, but I have courted my horrible destiny, and my reward is just and sure. Look forth, trembler—look forth—I command thee!” And he stamped with an air of authority and impatience that completed the terror of the delicate and impassioned being who shuddered in his grasp, and felt half-dead at his frown.
In obedience to his command, she removed the long tresses of her auburn hair, which had vainly swept, in luxuriant and fruitless redundance, the rock on which the steps of him she adored had been fixed. With that mixture of the docility of the child, and the mild
