“Be not angry with me, Farani; art not thou and all thy house dear to me, the Snarer of Souls and Keeper Away of Evil Things? And I can truly make a snare to save the soul of the Silent Man, if he so wishes it.” The low, impassioned tones of the wizard's voice showed him to be under strong emotion, and Lupton, with smoothened brow, placed his hand on the native's chest in token of amity.
“Farani,” said the wizard, “see'st thou these?” and he pointed to where, in the open doorway, two large white butterflies hovered and fluttered. They were a species but rarely seen in Mururea, and the natives had many curious superstitions regarding them.
“Aye,” said the trader, “what of them?”
“Lo, they are the spirits that await the soul of him who sitteth in thy house. One is the soul of a woman, the other of a man; and their bodies are long ago dust in a far-off land. See, Farani, they hover and wait, wait, wait. To-morrow they will be gone, but then another may be with them.”
Stopping at the doorway the tall native turned, and again his strange, full black eyes fixed upon the figure of Lupton's guest. Then slowly he untied from a circlet of polished pieces of pearl-shell strung together round his sinewy neck a little round leaf-wrapped bundle. And with quiet assured step he came and stood before the strange white man and extended his hand.
“Take it, O man, with the swift hand and the strong heart, for it is thine.”
And then he passed slowly out.
Lupton could only see that as the outside wrappings of fala leaves fell off they revealed a black substance, when Mr. Brown quickly placed it in the bosom of his shirt.
“And sure enough,” continued Lupton, knocking the ashes from his pipe out upon the crumbling stones of the old marae, and speaking in, for him, strangely softened tones, “the poor chap did die that night, leastways at kalaga moa (cockcrow), and then he refilled his pipe in silence, gazing the while away out to the North-West Point.”