He looked at her, turning his head slowly, as if it hurt him to move it. There, in the moonlight, in that scented park, her power, her tremendous magnetism, the intoxicating glory of her strange, baffling, childlike but commanding personality made his heart pound and set up in his huge frame a weak trembling. Had he possessed the power to think, this spell she had cast upon him, all within the space of seventy-two hours, would not have been possible of analysis. Perhaps the best explanation was the one he had already given—that he was as a man suddenly smitten with a plague.
“You tremble, Stoneface.”
“That is because I am weak, Tamea, and I am ashamed of my weakness. I, who came to scoff, remain to pray.”
“That is my desire. I would have you, of all men, suffer as you have made me suffer. I shall make of you a great stone idol, with stony face turned sadly to the sea, like those colossal figures on the coast of Easter Island. Yes, Stoneface. Now you may gaze long for that which never comes. I am avenged.”
She dropped his hands and with her own clasped tight against her tumultuous breast she looked at him with eyes that blazed with emotion. Mellenger sighed deeply and then his heavy, almost dull face lighted with a smile so tender the plain face was glorified.
“And when the gods rain blows upon me, O Tamea, I, too, shall take them standing and smiling. You have called me Stoneface. Very well. I withdraw my opposition. I would have you happy, even at the price of my old friend’s unhappiness, even at the sacrifice of my own. But I shall not gaze out to sea for that which never comes. For it shall come. And when I see you bent and broken and taking the blows with your flower face in the dust——”
Her glorious face softened. “Then what, Stoneface? Then what?”
“Then,” he murmured huskily, “I shall weep. But I shall also lift you up and hold you to my heart and love you, and my love shall endure in the days when you are old, and perhaps fat, when your beauty shall be but a memory. Yes, Tamea, when you too are a Stoneface gazing sadly out to sea for that which came—and went—and shall never, never come again, I shall love you and love you the more because your child’s heart will have been broken. You will, perhaps, remember this when you need a friend.”
He left her there and went away, with hands outstretched a little before him, like one who walks in darkness and is afraid.