So long accustomed to rise at the first signs of day, I was unable to break myself of the habit suddenly. Consequently, according to long custom, I awoke next morning just as the faint grey of dawn was appearing above the eastern hills. To wake and to get up were the same thing to a man of my abandoned restlessness. In less than twenty minutes, therefore, I was dressed. Picking a dew-covered rose-bud from the clusters about the window, I went downstairs fastening it in my buttonhole, passed out at the front door, and on to the verandah.
Taking the opposite direction from that in which Tiki had retired for the night, I found my way round the verandah to the back corner of the house, where, beneath heavy festoons of flowering vines, some wooden steps led down into a well-planned wilderness of a garden. There I roamed beneath the trees in the dim light and strange hush of early dawn. The faint twittering of a thousand birds came from the tall native trees that walled the place in from the outer world. It was a wonderful garden, and had evidently been laid out by some early settler with English ideas, long before Dreamer Grey came to the place. There were well-worn paths between umbrageous native matapo, titoki, and ngaio; and leaf-strewn sward beneath isolated fruit trees, which were quite forty years old.
Wandering about in this old-world garden, with now a glimpse of the rosy sky between the wall of native trees, and now the taste of a plum or cherry that hung low on the dewy branch, I came at length upon a curious grove of hazels planted in short rows, at right angles to a hawthorn hedge in such a way as to form a suite of five or six rustic rooms, roofed above by the arching boughs of the nut trees, walled in behind by the hedge, and screened from the rest of the garden in front by the drooping foliage of some branches trained for the purpose.
I saw all this in a first glance through the leafy screen of one of them, for the now crimson sky beyond, showing through a gap in the tall native trees and flooding in over the hedge, suffused the interior with a dreamy light. When I had pushed my way in I found that this garden retreat showed signs of occupation. There was a hammock slung across it from the stoutest stems of the hazels. A small table stood against one wall of stems, a rough seat against the other. An easel and palette reclined against the hedge, which was almost covered with the profuse pink bloom of geraniums; and, on the floor, carpeted with last year’s leaves and nuts, stood a cushioned wicker chair.
The dry nuts cracked beneath my heavy boots as I walked towards the hammock and picked up a book that lay there on a cushion. It was a well-worn volume of Shelley’s poems, and on the flyleaf was written, “Crystal Grey, her book.” I put it down and glanced round the quaint place again, murmuring to myself, “Crystal Grey, her studio.”
It seemed a place of dreams, and it suited my mood, so I placed the wicker chair against the hedge, and sat down to watch the delicate hues which were beginning to glorify the screen of leaves that shut me off from the garden. As the sun showed signs of his rising behind me these leaves, catching the flush, stood out against the shadows beyond. They changed from dark green to light, then glistened into a pale yellow. Finally, as the sun’s first ray struck through the pink geraniums on the hedge, they were glorified with delicate rosy hues, and all the place was suffused with the fresh dewy pink of early dawn. How beautiful it was, that glorious sunlight glistening on the silk pattern of the cushion in the hammock, touching the stems of the hazels with light and shadow, and striking the leaf-strewn ground with a deep russet as it fell even to the foot of the leafy screen, all fresh and dewy through the sparkling air.
I awoke from my dream at some sound that reached my ears. It was a footfall on the grass outside. It drew near. I heard the rustle of a skirt. In another moment the sunlit leaves about the entrance were drawn aside, and a girl entered. The boughs swung to behind her, and she stood in the sun ray, still holding one branch with her hand, while she regarded me for a moment with hesitation. I said a girl, but my first impression of Crystal Grey was that she was something between a proud goddess and a sweet angel: the former aspect slumbering in her coal-black eyes and wavy black hair, the latter wide awake upon her lovely face and perfect form, clad, as all angels are, in white. The mysterious eyes of deep night, and the hair of deeper night contrasted strangely with the innocent wistfulness of the rest of the face. If the eyes were those of some severe sage, made young again by a draught of his wondrous elixir, the sweet girlish lips looked as if they had kissed the early morning dew from a ripe peach and carried away the freshness of it. I rose from my wicker chair and stood facing her, with the hammock between us. I was too dazzled by this sudden apparition of girlish beauty, beyond my power to describe, to stammer out a single word; and, while I was trying to begin an apology for my rough appearance in her garden sanctum, she spoke first.
“Are you the stranger that brought the good news?” she asked, as she let go the branch and advanced a step towards me.
“I am,” I replied; “but that hardly excuses my trespassing here perhaps.”
She extended her fair, white hand, and, as I took it in my rough brown one, looking into her eyes the while, a combination of feelings took possession of me. I can only liken it to the laying of the foundation-stone of a love which would mount upwards for ever and ever, like a crystal staircase leading to the far-off heaven of her soul.
Her sweet lips moved, then trembled, but no words came. Only her eyes spoke unfathomable things, as they burned with feelings, tender and mysterious; only a sigh escaped her as she turned her head away.
“What is it affects you so in the news I bring?” I asked.
“My mother,” she replied; “is she still living? Do you think we can find her? Oh! tell me the story of your adventures again; perhaps there was something my father left out.”
She seated herself sideways on the hammock, while I resumed my wicker chair, and told again the story which I had narrated to her father the night before.
When I had finished, she said, “May Heaven reward you for all you went through.”
“I am rewarded already,” I replied.
“You mean that Heaven has rewarded you in advance by giving you a disposition that gets its happiness from making other people happy.”
I was ashamed of my poor attempt at a compliment and said, “Yes, that is what I meant”—though it was nothing of the kind—“only I am not clever at expressing myself.”
“Do you think that last shot of yours killed Ngaraki?” she asked, with a gentle concern in her voice, for I had told her more about the chief than I had to Grey the previous evening.
“I hope not,” I replied; “he was a noble fellow, and had a fine hatred of the Vile Tohungas, because, as he said, they were the Destroyers of Women.”
A slight change of expression passed over her face, and with a quick intuition she said:
“There is something you have kept back. Almost my only memory besides that of my mother’s face is what I think must have been an image carved out of marble, all white and beautiful. Did you see any such thing?”
“No, I did not see what you speak of, but I saw Ngaraki hold up his arms and gaze—like the Twelfth Tohunga I have told you about—up through the darkness to something which he knew was far above, and I judged from the chief’s manner that the object he was addressing was sublime and beautiful.”
There was a silence, during which Crystal was evidently engaged in trying to recall more of this earliest memory, while I was considering whether, if I spoke of Kahikatea’s experience, I should be breaking my promise to Te Makawawa. At length, proceeding on the argument that his discovery was independent of the old chief’s revelations, I concluded that I was on safe ground.
I said, “Now that you have mentioned the matter, I might tell you that I have a friend who says he has seen that beautiful image in a high cave in the mountain. How he got there I hardly know, and how he got out again he does not know himself, but he says he saw the marble statue of a lovely woman, young—almost a girl. She was standing near the mouth of the cave with her arms outstretched, as if to some vision in the western sky, and on her face was stamped a divine and radiant beauty, while her form, still and cold, yet full of motion, seemed ready to spring to life at a touch. The prayers of all women who lift their eyes unto the hills were upon her lips. The sightless eyes derived their love-light from the longing expressed by the whole figure yearning forward to some glorious future of our race when——”
I paused, for while I had been speaking Crystal’s hands had clasped themselves together in her lap, a rapt look had come to her eyes, and my thoughts wandered from the statue. However beautiful, however dazzling it might be, it could not be more so than this girl before me. Therefore, as I said, my thoughts wandered from the statue; I paused and she, with a start, turned her eyes upon me with looks of serious wonder.
“What a symbol of the ideal woman!” she said. “All white—standing far above the world—waiting, with a prayer upon her lips, for the dawn of a brighter day. She is the higher self of all women who wait and pray, and try to be white. What did your friend think?”
“He thought just what you think. Indeed, he even went so far as to fall madly in love with that ideal woman in his own strange, poetical style, and he now swears he will find his way to that cave to look upon her face again. Pygmalion and Galatea make a very pretty story between them, but don’t you think it’s rather a wild kind of poetry for a man of the nineteenth century to love a stone?”
She smiled a sweet, sad smile at one of the little leaves overhead, as it opened and shut its tiny door against the blue. “Surely it is not the stone your poetical friend has fallen in love with,” she said presently; “it is the beauty and meaning depicted on that stone—how, and by whom, is a mystery.”
The breakfast bell rang vigorously from the verandah, and covered the silence with which I greeted her last remark. It was not because I saw any reason for secrecy that I kept this part of Te Makawawa’s secret, but simply because it had been tacitly understood between him and me that it was not a matter for repetition.
Crystal rose from the hammock, and saying that her father would be waiting for us, led the way towards the house.
As she hastened before me among the trees of the garden, and, later, when she stood and waited for me on the verandah steps, looking down between the clustering vines, I thought that any man, no matter how poetical, was a fool to fall in love with the beauty depicted on a stone, when the world of living things contained such loveliness in the flesh. Truly it was as Kahikatea had said: the woman who had conceived the image of Hinauri and reproduced it upon the stone could not have borne an unlovely child. Yet to say that Crystal Grey was “not unlovely” would be a very inadequate description. More positive statements than that would have fallen from lips more matter-of-fact than mine. If eyes were made for seeing, then Crystal Grey had her own excuse for being, as someone somewhere sings, but if words were made for description, the subtle charm of this child of dreams could find no vehicle but music.
Having made up his mind to accompany me with his daughter on our search expedition, Dreamer Grey began setting his sheep-run and his household matters in order, in view of an absence which might prove prolonged. It was necessary to engage a competent manager to look after things, and this meant a delay of at least a week, which, however, would afford ample time to prepare for the journey. During the first two or three days of this week I saw much of Grey, helping him with his sheep and various other things that had to be seen to. As a consequence we got to know and trust each other well.
Tiki, who worshipped ‘the little maiden’ as if she were a divine being, and, when she spoke to him in his own tongue, replied invariably with a mixture of acquired politeness and native poetry, half comical, half grand to listen to, had made himself and me thoroughly uneasy about that taepo he had seen in Cazotl’s boat. With the wisdom of a savage, who, long accustomed to intertribal wars, knows almost intuitively when he is being tracked, if not why, Tiki had it firmly fastened in his mind that the people on the yacht ought to be watched. As I had not informed Tiki of my suspicion that we had been tracked along the whole course of our journey, I regarded his independent view more seriously than if he had known and exaggerated my own weird feeling in regard to that wizened negro.
“Very well, Tiki,” I said, the day after our arrival, when he spoke about it, “if you think ‘the little maiden’ is in danger from those people you might keep your eye on them.”
He needed no second permission. From that time I saw very little of him for several days, but I knew he was keeping a strict eye on the movements of Cazotl and his crew. It was not until the evening of the fourth day after our arrival that my suspicions received verification, and his watchfulness nearly cost him his life.
In the evening of that day, when Grey was busy with some correspondence in his library, I strolled down into the garden, where I knew I should find Crystal, for I had seen her go out some time before with her sketching book. I had dreams of a heaven on earth—indeed, I should have been less than human if more than three days had passed over my heart without bringing my ‘love at first sight’ to a stage in which I felt that the garden where Crystal moved and had her being was a sacred place. Sweetness lingered in the air. The dreamy trees, as they rolled in the summer zephyrs, made music which could not be written down; the rustic retreat beneath the hazels was full of an influence which I can only describe as the presence of angels lingering in an atmosphere which has been purified for them. Sitting here alone late at night, I had been able to cast aside the littleness of my life and feel that by right of an ennobling love I might remain there awhile on sufferance. I was aware that a great change had taken place in me. A new world had sprung into being, and the splendour of its sun, moon, and stars was centred in Crystal.
It was with a feeling that all this must soon come to an avowal of love, as surely as water boils at a given temperature, that I sought her that evening in the garden; and, I reflected, it would in all probability reach a sudden end just as surely as the same water under different conditions freezes at a given degree, for in all sober reason, who or what was I to deserve the love of such a girl? But I went to find her all the same, and making my way to the retreat beneath the nut-trees, held aside the leaves about the entrance and looked in.
Crystal was sitting in the wicker chair with an open book on her knees. Her hat was laid aside, and a wisp of her raven hair, fanned loose from the good-natured mass, half screened her cheek.
“May I come in?” I asked.
“Yes, of course you may,” she laughed, looking up and brushing the wayward wisp back into its place again. “Come and read me some of Kawana Kerei’s legends in the original Maori.” She held up the book as she spoke.
“In the original Maori?” I said, seating myself on the rough bench against the hazel stems. “That reminds me. I saw a picture in an out-of-the-way corner of the drawing-room to-day with something in Maori written beneath it: ‘Degrade the pure one! Whose is the task? Mine! Mine!’ Did you paint that picture?”
“Yes,” she replied simply; “I painted it quite lately.”
Seeing by her manner that she was a little confused, I asked: “Is it founded on some Maori legend?”
“No; it is—it is——” She hesitated, with her eyes cast down; then, after a pause, looked up with a shy smile and asked: “Have you ever had a very vivid dream, of which you can remember every detail so accurately that it seems like a real experience?”
“No,” I said; “my imagination is not strong enough for that; but if you are going to say that picture was painted from a dream of your own I shall believe you.”
She leaned forward in her chair and half whispered: “Yes, it was; I saw it as plainly as I see you now, Wanaki,”—she had caught my Maori name from Tiki—“even more distinctly, if that is possible.”
“Tell me your dream,” I said. “I could not see the faces of the men in the picture, as the light was not good, but I judge from the legend that they were evil. It is strange that you should see unlovely things in your dreams. Will you tell it me?”
“It is rather a terrible subject,” she said, “and I don’t think I quite understood it even when I had painted the picture. Perhaps you will tell me what it means. I dreamed that I went away over the sea for thousands of miles. The silver-tipped waves shone beneath in the bright moonlight, and the little islands, fringed with palms and belted with coral, were studded everywhere on the ocean. At last I came to a vast country, where, in the interior, there were great hills and mountain lakes, impassable swamps and deep wildernesses. I saw ancient ruins and long lines of what looked like giant cactus——”
“Mexico,” I said, thinking aloud.
“It may have been; it was vast and it was tropical. In my dream I found myself standing among the ruined pillars of what must once have been a colossal temple. Now, it usually happens in a dream that one sees things vaguely, but in my dream it was different. I saw every detail. The scale-like feathers on the huge stone snakes that were coiled up the pillars, the glittering eyes of the vampire bats that clung about them, the huge green lizard that basked in a patch of moonlight on the stone floor—all these were clear and distinct, and on the heavy, broken stonework overhead, supported by the pillars, were shadowy masses of creeping plants, with here and there a glistening aloe or clump of white flowers catching the moonlight through the crevices.
“As I was looking at these things in my dream a murmur of voices came from within. I advanced between the treble row of pillars and saw a large inner space where there were a number of figures moving about a tall column. They were men of different nationalities, and they chanted a strange song while they looked up at the full moon which poured its rays down into the open space. These men had strong, evil faces, with eyes that flashed red in the moonlight; I can remember each one perfectly, and have drawn them as I saw them.”
She paused as if she were recalling the vivid scene, and, in the few moments’ silence, my mind flew back to the Vile Tohungas of the Pit gazing up at the full moon, nursing their stomachs and curling their granite lips disdainfully as they worshipped. Ngaraki, no doubt, would have read in this dream a word from his Great Tohungas of the Earth to the effect that the Vile Brotherhood of Huo still existed, striving to work out the age-long degradation of Woman, and, above all, to destroy his ancient goddess, when, as the Daughter of the Dawn, she should return. Just as the sacred fire of Hinauri had been nursed in the breasts of her guardians through pre-Maori races up to the present, so the baleful red fire of the Vile Tohungas, taken into the north by their servant fleeing from the wrath of Zun, may have been kept burning through pre-Toltec civilisations even unto this day. In spite of myself, this idea was growing upon my mind, when Crystal continued.
“While I watched, their chant to the moon ended; and, as the last notes fell, I fancied I could hear them rolling back into the distance like the close of a song sung by a great multitude in the open air. Then a large black mirror was brought out of the darkness and fixed in position so that the moonray was reflected high up on to a dark part of the smooth stone wall of the ruin. They began a wild orgy round the pillar. It came to a sudden silence, and all stood still, gazing at the moonlight on the wall. I looked also and saw, not on the rock, but in the distance through the rock, what looked like the central thoroughfare of some great city. By the glare of many lamps, high and low, I saw carriages crossing and re-crossing, while omnibuses for ever stopped and moved on again. I saw people moving to and fro upon the broad pavements; all about were women—many of them proud-looking and beautiful—who appeared to be waiting for someone. I did not understand what they were doing there, but when the men in the open space of the temple cried ‘It is well! It is well!’ I knew that the vision had shown them the working out of some great wrong.
“The picture vanished, and they returned to their orgy, which grew more terrible and furious, then stopped suddenly as before, while they remained gazing fixedly at the moonlight on the wall. A second time there came a scene—not the same place, though the people acted in just the same way—and this also was greeted with the cry, ‘It is well! It is well!’
“It vanished, and a third time the wild orgy was carried on. It reached a pitch of fury which horrified me, and, when it stopped suddenly, and they stood gazing at the wall, the vision came again. But this time it was the white figure of a woman standing among the trees of a garden far away. The place was bathed in peaceful sunlight. It was a sun-picture reflected by the moon from a distant spot. I could not see the features of the woman, but her arms were raised to the sky, and she seemed to be praying. Then, as if in answer to her prayer, there came, out of the blue, beings that seemed more like gods and goddesses than men and women. They came thronging down towards the world—men with noble looks and perfect forms, and women with serene, heavenly faces full of all the tender goodness that should belong to a woman. They appeared to separate to the four quarters of space, and I thought that here was a race of more perfect beings coming to people this earth in answer to the cry of the woman.
“At a sound of murmuring and confusion, I turned to the other watchers in the open space, and, as I did so, one among them, who seemed to be chief, stood out from the rest and held up a threatening hand towards the far-off vision. He laughed, and his voice was more animal than human. Then he roared out the words you saw beneath my picture: ‘Degrade the pure one! Whose is the task? Mine! Mine!’ and with these words ringing in my ears I woke. That was the dream; was it not strange?”
“Very strange,” I said; “but your father called me as I was glancing at the picture, and I had not time to examine it very clearly. I should like to have a good look at it if I may.”
“Yes, I’ll run and get it now.”
“Let me go,” I volunteered. But she was before me, and ran up to the house. While she was gone I cast my memory over the extraordinary dream she had related. Matter of fact as I was, I could not but see that if ever there was a meaning in a dream there was a meaning in this. The Destroyers of Woman exulting at the slow undermining of mankind in the mass, their threat hurled at Woman as the Mother of a nobler and more godlike race, their resolve to degrade her as such, so that this world should be peopled with dull, coarse forms, informed by vile minds, such as their own evil faces portrayed—all this, I reflected with astonishment, was indeed the tale of Ngaraki the savage, retold from the heart of an innocent girl.
My reflections were cut short by the reappearance of Crystal with the picture.
“See!” she said, holding it up to the full light; “that is the man who roared out the words. Why—what is—oh! Mr. Warnock, what is the matter?”
I had turned from the picture with a gasp, and had sat down on the wooden bench with my face buried in my hands. I looked up as she repeated her words and saw mingled bewilderment and concern on her lovely face.
“It is the face of a fiend,” I said, “not of a man.”
“But why are you so strange? And why do you clench your teeth like that? You’re as pale as death—surely, Wanaki, the face of a fiend on canvas cannot be so terrible to look at!”
“It is the face of a fiend,” I repeated fiercely, half beside myself with maddening fears, “not of a man.”
It was the face of Cazotl. And, in those evil features, I traced a resemblance which had eluded me on my first sight of the Mexican in the flesh—a resemblance to the bold granite features of the chief of the Vile Tohungas of the Pit, so fiercely cursed by Ngaraki.
Very weird to me was this strange, circumstantial suggestion that the legendary chief of the Vile Tohungas had returned to be the actual head of a brotherhood whose aims and objects were identical with those of ancient time. Yet forcible and valid seemed the conception that as the guardians of Hinauri had brought their protecting curses down from the remotest past, so her enemies, who, although driven far into the north as the aged chief had said, had preserved their continuity as a Vile Brotherhood through the ages, had handed on even into the present their hatred of the Pure One, always with the aim of destroying her or causing her to forget her Sign of Power. For awhile my shrewd, practical scepticism struggled against a strong unity of evidence derived independently from different sources. The aged chief’s belief that the Vile Ones would return, Crystal’s dream picture of the Destroyers of Women, the undeniable resemblance of their chief to Cazotl and to the granite image in the abyss—these things pointed my mind to strange conclusions; but when I reviewed the conflicting purposes of the Good and the Vile of ancient time and identified them with the conflicting purposes of Ngaraki and Cazotl, I was for a moment almost tempted to throw my common-sense to the winds and say that the ancient giants of the two priesthoods had returned again and again to the earth to continue the fierce struggle begun at the very foundations of the world. But if Cazotl were the arch enemy of Ngaraki and the would-be destroyer of Hinauri, why should he have appeared to Crystal Grey in a dream? And why, again, should he seem to be in pursuit of her? A vague apprehensive shuddering within me was the only answer to these questions.
That night, long after the house was quiet, I remained leaning on the sill of my bedroom window, looking down on the peaceful garden below and turning matters over in my mind. The night wind sighed and died away in faint puffs upon the trees. A midnight hush was falling upon everything—a midnight hush and something more: great black clouds were banking up seaward, and the roses round my window were sending out heavy odours, such as flowers do before a thunderstorm. The air became sultry as the inky clouds banked higher and higher. Then the land wind fell altogether and dead silence ensued, in which I could hear the titoki-berries opening on their little hinges, and a strange sound of a going in the high tops of the native trees in the plantation, while always the leaves of the aspens tossed and turned in sad unrest.
It may have been the oppressiveness of the air that weighed me down with a vague presentiment of evil, though now I look back upon it I am inclined to think my feelings were owing to a strong antipathy to an evil thing. This antipathy must have been aroused and strengthened by the discovery recorded in the last chapter. Crystal’s dream had filled me with feelings even keener, I thought, than those which had taken possession of Ngaraki, for he, so I reasoned in my ignorance, had to do merely with inert stones, one sacred, others cursed; whereas I had to do with flesh and blood. I had little doubt that Crystal’s dream was one of those strange instances of second sight which sometimes come to people who live pure lives in quiet places, where they are in close touch with the nature they can see, and in closer touch with the nature which they cannot see. The likeness of the face in the picture to the face of Cazotl was no mere fancied resemblance. It was striking. It was real. The details of the picture, too, were true to life, and such as no amount of study from books could produce. This I coupled with the knowledge that Crystal had never been away from home except for seven successive years spent at school in Dunedin. I was driven to the conclusion that there was something in this dream, and, if something, why not everything? As I leaned over the window-sill I pondered many things deeply. Whatever might have been the reason of tracking us all the way from the Table Land the Mexican’s presence in the Sound appeared to me to be the speedy carrying out of the threat he had delivered in the dream. I could well understand that Crystal, with her high ideals and living energy, was of those women whose very existence is a nail in the coffin of the fiend in human shape whose glance first strikes the lily from your hand, and then the truth from beneath your feet. Consequently, on the one side deepened my love for this perfect woman with the eyes of night, and on the other blazed a terrible hate for her would-be destroyer.
With these feelings I entered into the spirit of the brooding thunderstorm, and, knowing that sleep was impossible, I resolved to go out of the house, and take my thunder and lightning in the garden. I had always been fond of a thunderstorm—for in a land where there are few isolated trees and many bold mountain tops, the danger from lightning is very small—but on this occasion I welcomed it with a kind of vivid pleasure, as it was in strict accordance with my mood.
Going downstairs, I found a mackintosh on the hat-stand in the hall and put it on. Then, making my way quietly out of the house, I went round the verandah to see if Tiki was asleep. I was not surprised to find his mattress of straw unoccupied. He was on the war track. Probably he had slept by day, and was not watching the yacht in the interests of ‘the little maiden.’
As I found my way on to the lawn I heard the first rumble of the thunder over the hills in the distance. The fan-like branches of the cedars were moving restlessly, as if the terrified air did not know which way to turn. I could just see their vague outlines against the blacker sky.
While I stood listening to the ominous whispers of the cedar-branches, a blinding flash lighted up the place, throwing the wall of pines above the plantation into clear relief. Then, some miles away, the thunder crashed and rattled among the hills. In the silence between the lightning and the thunder, however, I heard what I took to be a dog or a cat running softly on its four feet across the lawn from the plantation. My mood of dark hate blinded my usual wariness, and it never occurred to me that it might be something else. After the thunder came silence, and then another flash scribbled down the indigo sky into the hills, and, while it lighted my surroundings as clear as noonday, my glance happened to fall upon some gnarled, twisted, and charred remains of a patch of scrub which had lately been burnt, about twenty yards distant, and just midway between the plantation and the trees beneath which I stood. One of the grotesque fragments, a trifle thicker than the others, was twisted in such a peculiar way that its weirdness caught my attention, and when the flash had passed I sauntered carelessly towards it and waited. The peal of thunder was scarcely over when the vivid lightning streamed down again, and when I looked for the weird effect of the charred patch, it seemed to me that the grotesque-looking twist was gone. At the same instant something struck my hat behind—something which I mistook for the first large drop of the thunder-shower—and, dismissing the apparent change in the burnt-out patch of scrub with the passing explanation that it was owing to my change of position, I sauntered on towards the path that led out beneath the wall of trees into the fields of the valley. As I went I certainly thought it strange that one drop of rain should fall alone, and wondered vaguely what it was that had struck my hat during the vivid flash.
Passing through the plantation and the wall of pines, whose leaves threw out a resinous odour in the sultry air, I turned and walked back along the outside of the plantation, intending to re-enter the enclosure by a small gap which led directly on to the lawn. As I drew near this, and flash after flash lighted up the place, I saw from time to time something, which at first I took for a post, standing in an open space some thirty paces away from the plantation. When I came nearer to it, however, the lightning’s glare brought out the object in bold relief, and it looked more like a man standing bolt upright in the open field. The thunder now followed sharp on the heels of the lightning with a deafening crash right overhead, and the heavy rain came down without warning. Buttoning the mackintosh close up under my chin, I struck out into the field towards the spot where I had seen the object that had aroused my curiosity.
When I calculated that I was fairly near it, I stood still and waited for the flash, for in the darkness I could see nothing. The flash came, and there, a few steps before me, with the rain dancing from his hair and glistening shoulders, stood Tiki like a statue, gazing fixedly at that part of the plantation where the gap led through on to the lawn.
In the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder I called his name:
“Tiki!”
The words left my lips as the darkness clapped down like the door of a vault, and in the two seconds that ensued I listened and called again, but there was only the ready reply of the thunder breaking like an avalanche overhead.
The next moment I reached the Maori’s side in the darkness, touched him, shook him, called him, but he made no answer. I could hear the rain pattering on his bare shoulders; I could hear my own voice against the final echo of the thunder; then, as the rain held up a moment and a weird shuddering afterthought of the elements ricochetted across the sky, I stood still, wondering what strange state the Maori had fallen into that he stood there like a dead tree-trunk in the field.
The next flash startled me. It showed Tiki with his teeth set and his eyes fixed. He appeared like one in that strange cataleptic state in which the mind and senses are more or less alive, but all volition is gone. As my eyes rested upon him I detected on his shoulder a slight stain of blood, which slowly trickled from a wound in which a small reed dart of two or three inches in length was still sticking. All this was imprinted upon my eye while the light lasted, but it was not until darkness supervened that the picture was developed. I found the dart and pulled it out. Then, as the heavy tread of Tawhaki again shook the rafters on the House of Tane overhead, I came to the horrible conclusion that this was the work of that wizard negro—that the thing which had struck my hat by the cedars was a poisoned dart of the same kind—that the gnarled and twisted fragment was the negro himself, that——
A shudder ended my train of reasoning. The door of the house was unbarred!
That wizard devil must have been on his way to the house when he discharged that dart at me!
With terrible thoughts surging through my brain, with the phantom cry of Cazotl, “Degrade the Pure One!” ringing in my inner ears, and the passing conjecture that he was now waiting with a boat on the beach for the return of his wizard minion with Crystal, bereft of all volition like Tiki, I dashed across the space that separated me from the gap which led towards the house. No helping flash favoured me on the way, and when I reached the trees I had to grope about for the opening. At last I found it and proceeded to make my way through, but, just as I reached the centre of the plantation, the lightning forked down right on to the lawn and ran along the ground. For quite five seconds a dazzling light revealed the way on to the lawn, and in that brief space of time things happened which five seconds will not suffice to tell.
Straight before me on a narrow path between two pine trunks, was the lithe figure of the hideous negro in the act of groping his way through from the house as the lightning fell. In one hand he held a reed tube several feet long, and with the other he was feeling for the tree trunk on his right. Behind him I had a dim idea of a white-robed figure; but I did not shift my eyes from the negro, for he saw me as soon as I saw him, and the tube was moving towards his wizened lips. With a spring I was on to him, and, catching the tube with one hand just as he set it to his lips, I turned it aside, gave him a violent thrust in the mouth with it, wrenched it away, and flung it on the ground. Then I gripped him by the throat, and it was just as we rolled back together into the bushes that the bright light went out, and our brief struggle went on in the darkness.
It was brief, for I defy any man to hold a creature of that kind unless his hand, like Kahikatea’s, could meet right round his neck. He twisted and turned like an eely fiend, wrenched his throat out of my grasp, and wriggled away, leaving me snatching at air and tree trunks.
The thunder rolled off in an angry growl. As it ceased the same wild laugh that I had heard before came from somewhere far away. Mistrusting that laugh, and thinking that the negro was in hiding near by, waiting to make a dash to snatch up his deadly weapon, I quickly scrambled towards the place where I had thrown it, and soon found it among the leaves in the darkness.
Then I remembered the figure in white that I had seen following the negro, and stood peering before me, listening and waiting for the next flash. I would have called, “Who’s there?” but I knew it was best to preserve perfect silence with that wizard thing, for there was no telling what he might do with his infernal poisoned darts, even without a tube. However, I could not resist throwing out a gentle hint that I was prepared for him, and that his safest plan was to beat a retreat. Taking my revolver from my hip pocket, where I always carried one, I fired a shot up into the trees. It was answered by the hideous laugh from far away down the Sound, but it followed so quickly on the report that I knew the author of that laugh, now a confessed ventriloquist, was near at hand. He was evidently waiting for the next flash to recover his tube which I held in my hand.
The flash came, and the sight it revealed I shall never forget. There stood Crystal in the path before me, draped in her night garments soaked through and through. Her long black hair, in which flashed countless diamonds of rain, fell loose about her like a veil. Her mysterious eyes, now like polished obsidian, were fixed in a glassy stare. Her face was set and pale, like a piece of beautiful marble. She was in the same state as Tiki, conscious of much that was passing, as I learned afterwards, but obedient only to impressions that had been set upon her by the will of another, who had taken control of her own. On her shoulder, showing through a rift of her hair, was a stain of blood upon the white linen, but the dart had been withdrawn.
No sooner had the flash of light passed than that controlling will was expressed by a voice, harsh and hollow, coming from a little distance outside the plantation, and pronouncing a strange word in a
language unknown to me. At the sound Crystal attempted to move past me in the darkness, evidently impelled by the suggestion that she must follow. But with one arm I caught her round the waist and held her back. She struggled violently with all her strength to follow the voice as it repeated the strange word from further in the field, and it dawned upon me, from what little I knew of this old and new world black magic of control by suggestion, that if I restrained her by force the result might be some strange twist of the brain or aberration of the nervous centres. So I let her move on, retaining one of her hands and walking by her side for a short distance into the field. A flash revealed a figure gliding ahead of us, and in order to make him glide a little quicker, I fired four revolver shots in succession after him. Then, acting upon an idea which had occurred to me, I tried to imitate the voice and the strange word he had used. After two or three attempts beneath my breath, I made the peculiar sound, coming to a halt at the same time.
It was effective: Crystal stopped also and turned towards me.
Repeating the word I drew her gently back towards the plantation, and she followed obediently. It was with the idea that her sense of sight might contradict her sense of hearing that I pressed her eyelids down and bound my handkerchief over her eyes, lest, when the lightning flashed, she should see me and become aware of this deception within a deception.
Thus reiterating the guiding sound which, by the bond of suggestion placed upon her by the infernal negro wizard, represented his will, I wrapped the mackintosh about her and led her through the plantation, over the lawn, and into the house. There, obedient to my instructions, given to her in the harsh voice of the negro, she remained in the care of Grey and the servants, with whom I succeeded in placing her in touch, while I, having hidden the reed tube in a safe place, hurried out to look for Tiki.
The storm had passed over, and was grumbling itself out in the distance. A bright star shone down through a break in the clouds, but it was still too dark to see clearly, and it was with difficulty I made my way to the place where Tiki had been standing.
After searching about for a long time and finding nothing, I was favoured by the moon in its last quarter rising over the hills inland and showing through the heavy cloud drift. By this pale light I corrected my position and searched again. But there was no sign of Tiki. Had he recovered and gone after the negro to kill him, or had he followed obediently under the influence of the poison and the voice?
After a restless night, gladdened somewhat by the thought that I had saved Crystal from a terrible fate, but for the most part troubled by fears of further danger, I rose early, and, passing through the gap in the plantation where I had encountered the wizard negro, walked over the field and down the valley towards the beach, thinking that perhaps I might learn something of Tiki’s fate.
Finding nothing to guide me, I climbed a high hill seaward, which overlooked the lower part of the Sound. From that vantage ground I could see nearly the whole of the slender arm of the sea which reached inland, the failing breath of the land breeze ruffling its waters. A glance at the sheltered cove where the yacht had been anchored told me that Cazotl had either shifted his position or put out to sea. I scanned the whole length of the Sound, and at last discerned the yacht passing into the shadows of the high cliffs which opened on to the Pacific. Her sails were swelling out to the breeze, and it was with a feeling of great relief that I watched her disappear between the high rocks. But my relief did not outlive reflection, for I soon saw that it was not at all probable that Cazotl would relinquish his object after one failure.
The sun had risen high in the sky by the time I had returned to the house, and while waiting for the breakfast-bell I strolled round the verandah. When I came to the corner dedicated to Tiki, I was surprised to find that faithful Maori coiled up on his bed of straw, wrapped in his mat, and fast asleep. He must have returned in my absence.
With an inconsiderate impatience to know what had befallen him I stooped down and touched him on the shoulder, knowing from experience that the slightest thing would wake him But he did not stir. I then shook him soundly, but he made no sign. With a sudden apprehension I bent over him and listened for his breathing. It was regular and deep; he was evidently sleeping off the effects of that strange poison, and, as far as I could judge, he was best left alone.
On going inside I encountered Grey coming downstairs.
“Good morning, Warnock,” he said, as he grasped my hand. “That was an extraordinary affair last night—can’t think what possessed the girl: she’s never done anything of that kind before. Good job you saw her, or there’s no telling what might have happened.”
“Yes, it was lucky I happened to be abroad,” I replied; “I went out to enjoy the thunderstorm.” Then I explained briefly how it had occurred, but omitted all mention of the negro and his infernal arts, as I thought it was better to keep that mysterious and alarming part of the matter to myself.
“Is she up yet?” I asked in conclusion.
“No; I’ve just been in to see her. She’s fast asleep and seems perfectly all right.”
“Ah! yes,” I said with assumed carelessness; “that’s the way out of those peculiar fits: to let them sleep as long as ever they will.”
With that we went to breakfast, and discussed at length the details of our proposed journey north, which was now finally fixed for the following day. Grey’s manager was to arrive on the morrow, and, the day after, we were to proceed overland to a seaport some thirty miles to the north, and there take our passage in a sailing ship which Grey had ascertained was bound for Golden Bay, the coast line of which was situated not fifty miles from the Table Land.
From time to time during the day I learned by repeated inquiries that Crystal was still sleeping peacefully, but my mental state was one of extreme tension; for, being ignorant of the after effects of the strange poison, I was tormented with a thousand apprehensions. Every half-hour I paid visits to Tiki, for in his condition I felt I had something to go by. It calmed my fears a little to find that his pulse was uniformly regular, that his breathing was normal, and that there were no signs of anything more alarming than a very deep sleep which, as far as I could judge, was perfectly natural. In this way, taking Tiki’s state to represent hers, I watched over Crystal in my imagination the whole day long, now tortured with fears for the issue, and now relieved by the healthy symptoms.
In my wanderings in and out and about the house I remembered the wizard’s reed tube, and found it again in the place where I had hidden it. It was a strange-looking reed, seven knotted, and marked with peculiar characters and signs. The darts were arranged in little receptacles round the mouthpiece. Three were left. I extracted one and inspected it. There was a blood-red tip to it, and this crimson dye I knew was the poison. The safest course would be to burn the accursed things, lest they should do damage by accident. Accordingly, I took them to the kitchen grate and burnt them. What the poison was I have no idea, but, as I threw them in one by one, each emitted a jet of some gas, which burned many colours in succession, giving a peculiar wail, like the cry of a tortured dumb animal. So horrible, and yet so plaintive and pathetic was this faint sound, that I was inclined to confess there was more than poison in those accursed messengers of evil. Then I burned the tube and returned to my restlessness.
At length, late in the afternoon, I was standing beneath the nut-trees, whither I had wandered in my anxiety, when, hearing a rustle of a dress outside, I looked up and encountered Crystal as she parted the screen of leaves and came towards me. My fears bounded off in an instant, for her face was the picture of buoyant health, and the flush of confusion on her cheeks made her look radiant.
She extended her hand to me and said, “It’s very absurd for people to walk in their sleep, but I am very grateful to you all the same.”
“What are you grateful for?” I asked, wondering how much of the affair she remembered.
“Why, father told me you found me walking in the garden and brought me in,” she replied, looking hard at me with unwavering eyes, though her cheeks were crimson.
“Oh! he told you that, did he?”
“Yes, but not until I made him. He wouldn’t tell me anything about it at first.”
“You remembered something of what happened, then, and questioned him for the rest?”
“Yes, I remembered a little and insisted on being told the whole story.”
“Will you tell me what you remember?” I urged.
She passed beneath the head of the hammock, and walking up to the hedge, plucked a piece of the pink geranium-bloom. Turning to me with a shy smile she held it out towards me.
“I will give you this pretty flower,” she said lightly, “if you will never speak about it again—it was all so absurd.”
“I’m not joking, Miss Grey,” I said half angrily; “I must know—I will know.” I had a horrible fear that could only be dispelled by the knowledge that she could account for all the acts of that infernal wizard.
The smile faded from her lips. She drew herself up and anger darted from her black eyes.
“You dare to ask me what I do not choose to tell?” she said, and never was a man so withered in spirit by a look from a woman’s eyes as I was then. What was the mystery in them? They seemed to belong not to this age, but to be looking at me from the beginning of the world. For a moment I could hardly understand that they should be set in the lovely face before me.
But the flash of anger passed, and, before I could falter a crestfallen apology, she said, “Forgive me; I was forgetting all I owe to you. My temper was too hasty.”
“I think I was too hasty in demanding to know what did not concern me,” I ventured. “Perhaps I have been too hasty all along in meddling with affairs that——”
“Ah! don’t say that,” she broke in, with a sharp pain in her voice; “you have found me a father, you will give me back my mother, and I—I have spoken angrily to you.” A tear glistened on her lashes; her bosom heaved beneath the white folds of her dress, and in her eyes was a tender light of love.
A wild thrill passed through me. In another moment I should have done a rash thing—indeed, in after years I often wished I had done that rash thing, that I had clasped that lovely one in my arms for a brief second and then been struck dead. But the lapse of half that time showed that the love-light was not for me. She raised her eyes, but not to mine, and said with sweet repetition, “My mother! My mother!”
With a slight start she recalled herself and turned to me.
“Do you know, I feel there is hardly anything I could not tell to you,” she said. “That was why I told you my dream, which I have never told to another living soul, not even to my father. And now, if, after what I said a minute ago, you would care to hear what I remember of last night I will tell you—but it is all very stupid.”
“If I think it is stupid I will say so,” I said.
Crystal seated herself upon the hammock, and, taking off her hat, placed it in her lap, where she proceeded to fasten the geranium-bloom among the other fresh flowers therein, as an excuse for keeping her eyes cast down in shyness at what she considered the stupidity of her story. I remained standing, for my suspense was keen, and I felt that I should understand it better than she did.
“Well,” she said, “I dreamed that I was sitting on a bank, when a black snake suddenly hissed and darted at my shoulder. The pain of the bite and the horror of the thing woke me, or I suppose I dreamed that it woke me, for what followed was exactly as if I had been awake, though of course it was nothing more than a vivid dream. Is it possible to dream that you are sitting up in bed, wide awake? It was very strange, but I thought that I was awake, and that I had lost all power to move. For a moment I listened to the thunder. Then I heard a voice—a peculiar, harsh, hollow voice, telling me that I must follow its directions, and be oblivious of all other things—for this, the voice, was the only thing. It may seem strange, but I did as it directed without the slightest hesitation. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to get up and walk downstairs in obedience to this ugly voice. Out of the house and across the lawn I followed it, until I came to the way that leads through the plantation. There for a moment I seemed to be at a loss. Then something—I cannot tell what, except that it was not the voice—must have stood in my way and held me, for, when I could again hear the only thing there was in the world, I was unable to follow, although I struggled to do so. At last the obstacle let me pass, and soon afterwards I caught up with the voice, which guided me back again into the house, where it told me that it had no further authority over me, and that other voices should command me for awhile. After that I heard it no more, and I have confused memories of taking a hot bath, with Jane and Mary fussing about me. Then I must have gone to bed, but I can remember nothing more till I awoke an hour ago. Was it not absurd? But some of it must have been real, for I did walk out into the garden.”
I reflected a moment before I spoke. Her memory evidently covered every inch of the ground. The pain in the shoulder, which must have been the prick of the negro’s dart discharged during the first flash of lightning after he gained her room; the falling under the influence of the poison a moment later; the hearing of the voice in the darkness, and the ready obedience to its suggestions; the struggling with an obstacle which was not the voice, but myself, and subsequently the finding of what she mistook for the voice and followed back to the house—these were the points of a story, the details of which must have taken place in the few minutes which elapsed between my missing the grotesque fragment in the burnt patch of scrub, and walking round the plantation to re-enter the grounds again through the opening where I had encountered the embodied “voice” and its would-be victim.
I glanced up from my rapid reflection, and, encountering Crystal’s smile at what she supposed was the absurdity of her story, said: “Your dreams affect me just as if you were recounting an adventure that had really taken place. Why do you make them so vivid?”
Then we both laughed the matter away.
Later in the evening I visited Tiki again, and found him sitting up with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Is the little maiden safe?” he asked on seeing me.
“Quite safe,” I replied, and narrated briefly what had happened. “Where were you all last night?” I inquired when I had finished.
“He Wanaki,” he replied, shaking his head slowly, “I have it somewhere in my mind where I was, but it slips away from my grasp like an eel from the hand. I have the head of the lizard, but the tail is cut off, and, though I can hear it rustling among the leaves, I cannot find it. This is the head of the lizard, O Wanaki. I watched the great canoe from sunset on into the night, and, when it was very dark, I heard a small canoe leave it and take its way towards the end of the water. I followed it along the shore, and when it came to the beach down there I stood near by in the darkness and heard some voices. Then someone made his way up the beach, and I followed the sound of his footsteps. He must have heard me, for he stopped and made a noise like the word of the weka22 when it is hiding. E Tama! I was mad to take his head, for I knew he was going to steal the little maiden. I rushed towards the ‘word’ and laid about me with my stick. Again and again I did this, rushing at the ‘word’ in the dark to take the head of it and lay it at the feet of the little maiden. But every time I beat the air and nothing more, and every time I heard someone laugh far away in Reinga. Eta! my only fear was for the little maiden, so I followed the footsteps again up the valley until we came to the field out there. The footsteps stopped. Tawhaki was beginning to move overhead. The light of his eyes would soon show me where to strike. The light came. I saw the taepo near at hand and rushed at him. He raised a long stick to his mouth, and some stinging thing struck me in the shoulder. Then, O Wanaki, I rushed on and on over all the earth, and the darkness of Porawa closed on me as I went.
“That is the head of the lizard, O Wanaki, but the tail of it is cut off and wriggles away when I stretch out my hand to grasp it. What has happened to me between that and this is gone—gone like last year’s kohu leaves.”
For a space neither of us spoke, but my thoughts were busy. At length, jumping to a conclusion I said:
“Tiki! did you know that we are to leave here the day after to-morrow?”
“Yes; the little maiden told me so.”
“Did you know that we are going to land in Golden Bay?”
“Yes, and go overland to the Great Tapu.”
“Ah! all right—very well—now you’d better go and get something to eat.”
I rose and walked round the verandah, sick at heart. It was as I had feared. That infernal wizard had, without a doubt, gleaned all our plans from Tiki while in the obedient condition, and then sent him home to sleep, with the assurance that on waking he would remember nothing of what had taken place from the moment he fell under his influence up to the time he came out of it. There was but one conclusion to all this. Cazotl had sailed for Golden Bay to await our arrival.
It was the last day at the home of Crystal, and it was the last day, too, of my fool’s paradise, from which I was driven by a fact as startling as a flaming sword. Love at first sight was a thing I well understood, but love at ‘second sight’ was a matter which before that day I should have rejected as a wild impossibility—a thing to be sworn to only by a class of visionaries who will swear to anything, even on hearsay, provided it be sufficiently marvellous. The tale of my love at first sight, its beginning, its hopes, its fears, and its fate—not its ending—may be inferred from the brief attention I have called to it here and there in this history of adventure; but Crystal Grey’s love at ‘second sight’ for another, whom she had never seen in the flesh, but who stood none the less surely between her and me, must be told in detail.
It was scarcely surprising that a deep love which sprang up in full tide in the brief space that it requires for the senses to transmit an image to the brain and impress its meaning on the heart, should not flow silently for very long. Up to the day of which I write it had not entered Crystal’s mind that she was as a goddess in my eyes; it had not occurred to her that when, filled with thoughts of the great happiness which I, as a mere instrument in the hands of a loving Providence, had brought her, she let her dark eyes meet mine with the warm regard of a pure soul in them, I should be blinded by love into the fatal conclusion that she could return my love. But something occurred to Grey. That very morning, as we stood alone on the verandah after breakfast, he had said to me: “Warnock, my friend, I like you—I seem to have known you a long, long time. Listen to me. I have found my daughter; Heaven may will it that I shall find my wife; and then, when times are more settled, it may chance that, in the man who will have been instrumental in restoring these two greatest blessings, I may find a son.” He placed his hand on my arm, as he added with a smile, “My dear boy, I know what I am talking about. I may have forgotten nearly half of my life, but I can see what I can see. Speak to her, Warnock. Speak to her, my dear boy. Nothing would please me more than to call you my son.” With a final hearty clap on my shoulder he left me wondering how on earth he could have found out what I had revealed only to the stars and the setting sun. It is strange how people in love fancy that no one can know the fact until they are told.
So I spoke to Crystal, and in accordance with the matter-of-fact bed-rock of my nature, I did not waste many words in doing it. After spending most of the day in reviewing mazes of words which might possibly hold my feelings and convey them, I scattered everything to the winds, emptied my brain, and, with a full heart, strode down to the nut-trees, where I stood before her with my hat in my hand and said, “Crystal! I want to tell you something.”
She looked a little surprised at my first use of her Christian name, but, looking up, said sweetly, “What is it, Wanaki?”
“It is this,” I said. “I love you more than anything else in the world: so much that—that——”
I paused, for a look of pain flitted across her brow and the colour left her cheeks. She rose from her seat and stood facing me, with a soft, despairing sorrow in her eyes, while to her lovely face was added a sadness that made it more lovely still; for even in that moment, while I seemed plunged for ever into outer darkness, the sweet soul of tender pity and pain suffusing the face of the woman I loved was like balm to my crushed spirit.
“Wanaki, oh, Wanaki!” she said, “I am more sorry than I can say. I owe you everything, but I cannot return your love. Oh! I could take my heart out and crush it for what it tells me—that I cannot turn it to you: that I cannot love you, Wanaki.”
Her words sounded in my ears like a plaintive lament sung over my dead hopes, over the ashes of my heart. I knew not what to say; for awhile I stood dumb, trying to conceal my pain. But she, watching me with anxious eyes, searched it out, and turned away with a low moan. Her bosom heaved beneath her white dress—I knew it was with sorrow for me—but she said no more.
“Why?—tell me why!” I said at length, with a vague feeling that this terrible state of things required some explanation; “do you love someone else?”
She looked at me for a moment without answering. Then she said: “Yes, but—but he—I have never seen him.”
She averted her eyes and hung her head in a manner which showed me that she considered I had a kind of right to question her as to the cause of my misery.
“You love a man you have never seen?” I said quickly, feeling there was a ray of hope.
“You hated a man you had never seen,” she replied just as quickly; “the man in the picture whom you called a fiend—you hated him because his face revolted you. Then why should I not love a man I have never seen?”
“But I saw the face depicted, and I hated the meaning of it.”
“Well, I too have seen a face, and I love the meaning of it.” She spoke still sadly, but like a woman who means to hold her own.
“In the same way as you saw the other?” I asked with a gleam of intelligence.
“Yes; in dreams—in many dreams. For years my heart has been given to the heart of the man whose face I see in dreams.”
“But do you believe that man exists in the flesh?”
“Yes; I believe I shall meet him some day.” A light chased the sadness from her eyes—a light like that of a star when night is darkest.
“But you rejected the idea that the vile one, whose face you have pictured, had any original on earth—why deny to the one what you grant to the other?”
“I do not fear the vile one enough to believe in him, but my love for the other compels belief.”
“It is a phantom of the brain,” I urged on hearing this. “What proof have you that it is the presentment of a living man?”
“None, except a strange feeling I have in regard to it.”
I was silent for a little. I felt an uncompromising belief in her strange feelings.
“Listen, Wanaki,” she said after a pause. “You told me of a man who saw his heart’s desire depicted in a sculptured stone, and when you spoke of his love I said I quite understood it. I meant that his love was similar to mine: he loved the ideal woman—I love the ideal man.”
I bent my brows and tacitly admitted the similarity.
“Tell me what he is like,” I said presently, “so that I may try to understand.”
She placed her hand within the bosom of her dress and drew forth a cameo attached to a golden chain.
“Honestly,” I said as I drew near to examine it, “I do not see why a mere face should carry such conviction with it. And why,” I added to myself, as she unfastened the chain and placed the cameo in my hand, “why should a mere dream face, an unsubstantial vision of the brain stand between me and——”
There I paused, for my glance had fallen upon the face which I had just assured Crystal was a phantom of the brain.
Heavens! It was the face of my friend Kahikatea! The lofty, massive forehead, surrounded by his orderly-disorderly mane, his brows slightly bent with thought, his nostrils dilated in the way I knew so well, his lips set firm with purpose, and his eyes, full of his inexplicable love, gazing into space and slightly raised, as if to some distant mountain top—this was the picture of my friend, even down to his short brown beard and moustache—this was the man whom Crystal loved, yet had never seen in the flesh. His look recalled the moment, when, by the false grave beneath the great rimu, I asked him to come with me to search for Crystal, and he replied that he had hitched his waggon to a star, that he had made up his mind to search for Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, and would not turn aside to look for the daughter of a mortal woman.
As I gazed in silence at the face of my friend, a wicked lie rose up out of the ashes of my heart, and threatened to gain the mastery. Then I looked up and met Crystal’s eyes burning into mine, and felt my love leap up again and light the way through the dark. Thoughts crowded tumultuously through my brain, and clearest of all was the thought that Kahikatea, worshipping his ideal as depicted in the image of Hinauri, had renounced all other women, Crystal among them. Therefore it would be cruel to tell her that she was in exactly the same position as I was.
I said, “I have the same feeling about it as you have, I will regard it as the face of a living man. It is my love tells you this from the centre of my heart, for my love for you is the grandest thing I have ever known. But what should you do if, when you meet him in the flesh, you find that his love is given to another?”
“I do not know,” she replied slowly, “but my heart tells me I should be plunged into the dark.”
“But what if you found, as I have found with you, that he loves an abstraction—something less real than yourself——”
She looked up quickly. “You mean if he was like your friend, who loves the ideal woman in marble?”
Before I could reply, and while she regarded me attentively, I felt my eyelids flutter together as if the light were too strong. Then I said, “Yes, supposing he were like that friend of mine—would you despair?”
“I should not attempt to stand between him and his ideal,” she replied decisively.
I handed her back the cameo, saying, “Neither will I attempt to stand between you and yours, while you love it as you do.”
There was a pause, in which Crystal remained looking straight before her as if she had not heard my last words. Presently she turned to me with a perplexed expression and asked quickly:
“Why did you compare him to your friend? Why did you start when you saw his face? Why did you—Wanaki! there is something you are hiding from me.”
She stood before me, her bosom heaving with emotions that showed upon her face as pain and joy struggling together. I saw that it was useless for me to attempt to conceal what her quick intuition had already grasped.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I would have concealed it from you, because you would be happier not to know it. But my tongue carried me too far. The face you have shown me is the face of my friend Kahikatea, who has renounced the love of woman for love of a symbol of pure womanhood—an ideal beauty wrought upon a piece of cold marble which he has seen, and you have seen, in the mountain cave where you were born.”
The struggle between joy and pain upon her face came to an end, and joy sat there triumphant in her eyes.
“Oh! you have explained the meaning of his face. His love is far above the world. I see in his eyes the prayers of all great men for something more divine in woman—the demand for some higher strength and beauty of being than has hitherto been required of us. Ah! Wanaki, if one woman can do anything in this great world, I will see that the prayer of the man I love shall be answered to some extent in the hearts of women.”
On the plane of this high love she was safe, but I knew that there would be times when her more direct and personal love for Kahikatea would rebel against the fact that she herself was to him merely as one in a great multitude. She did not know, neither did I tell her, that although Kahikatea never lost sight of the symbolic meaning he had attached to Hinauri, yet he, in his turn, had a direct and personal love for Hinauri herself. Once, when we had been discussing that part of the legend which told of her return in the future he had said, “You call my fascination a piece of extravagant poetry, a love for a mere abstraction, but I tell you, Warnock, that if the marble Hinauri were suddenly transformed into a living woman, she would still be my ideal, but at the same time as real to me as any woman can be to the man who loves her.” Had I told Crystal flatly that the man whom she loved loved another, I could not have put more accurately what I knew; but not wishing to lessen the power of her resolve to work her love out in the world, I merely said: “Your nature is good and strong: you will carry out your resolve in the way that your star directs, but for myself, you must forgive me if during our journey north I am a sadder, if a better, man for this great love of mine.”
She looked at me sorrowfully, while a tear came from the black depths of those eyes of night and glistened in her lashes. It trembled and fell. She turned in silence and passed out through the screen of leaves. That tear was more to me than any words could have conveyed.