CHAPTER XVII.
LOVE AT SECOND SIGHT.
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.