CHAPTER XIII.

CRYSTAL GREY.

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.”

[image: images/img165.jpg caption: “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.”]

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.