"I am no longer sad, Mr. Renault," she said tremulously. "I comprehend that I have no longer any chance in the world."
"Not among your adopted people," I said, "but white people understand. There is no reason, child, why you should not carry your head proudly. You are guiltless, little sister."
"I am truly unconscious of any sin," she said simply.
"You have committed none. His the black shame of your betrayal! And now that you know him for the foul beast he is, there can be no earthly reason that you should suffer either in pride or conscience. You are pitifully young; you have life before you--the life of a white woman, with its chances, its desires, its aims, its right to happiness. Take it! I bid you be happy, little sister; I bid you hope!"
She turned her face and looked at me; the ghost of a smile trembled on her lips; then, inclining her head in the sweetest of salutes, she wheeled her horse out into the tremulous starlight. And after her stole the tall Oneida, rifle slanted across his naked shoulders, striding silently at her stirrup as she rode. I had a momentary glimpse of their shadowy shapes moving against the sky, then they were blotted out in the gloom of the trees, leaving me in the road peering after them through the darkness, until even the far stroke of the horse's feet died out, and there was no sound in the black silence save the hushed rushing of the stream hurrying through the shrouded hollow below.
Not a light glimmered in the settlement. The ungainly tavern, every window sealed with solid shutters, sprawled at the cross-roads, a strange, indistinct silhouette; the night-mist hung low over the fields of half-charred stumps, and above the distant bed of the brook a band of fog trailed, faintly luminous.
Never before had I so deeply felt the desolation of the northland. In a wilderness there is nothing forbidding to me; its huge earth-bedded, living pillars supporting the enormous canopy of green, its vastness, its mystery, its calm silence, may awe yet nothing sadden. But a vague foreboding enters when man enters. Where his corn grows amid the cinders of primeval things, his wanton gashes on tree and land, his beastly pollution of the wild, crystal waters, all the restlessness, and barrenness, and filth, and sordid deformity he calls his home--these sadden me unutterably.
I know, too, that Sir William Johnson felt as I do, loving the forest for its own beautiful, noble sake; and the great Virginian, who cared most for the majestic sylvan gardens planted by the Almighty, grieved at destruction, and, even in the stress of anxiety, when his carpenters and foresters were dealing pitilessly with the woods about West Point in order to furnish timber for the redoubts and the floats for the great chain, he thought to warn his engineers to beware of waste caused by ignorance or wantonness.