“An omen!” Zarka cried, and his voice was carried and re-echoed far away, in and out of the rocks and chasms. “My alter ego! Have you come to bid me take courage in answer to my prayer? Have you known my thoughts, and risen to the bidding that was in my heart? Then you are more than mere shadow of mortal man, bugbear of timid ignorance; you are more than this, you must be. You are he that serves us when we have the courage to call you; you are myself! Zarka—Aubray Zarka in the forces of Nature, outside this puny flesh; you are my ministering familiar to give me my heart’s desire. Now you will grant it! Give this girl to me in the teeth of my rival, in spite of herself. Turn her heart to me, and let her will be as nothing matched with mine!”
The wild reckless spirit of the superstitious gambler was on him. The habit of speculation, added to the fire in the blood, had changed the sane shrewd schemer to an almost childish omen-seeker.
He stretched out his hands passionately towards the spectre. “Am I not your child—your very self on earth? Shall I not be merged in you, and be as you are when this clay lies cold in the ground? I have power; power of will, power of gold! And my power shall not be mocked. In me the heart to desire is one with the power to have. So, my genius—angel—devil, whate’er you be, in these desperate passes, give me my desire; the brain, the will, the courage—for fair or foul, harden my heart, strengthen my hand. Be with me now, as I shall be with you hereafter. Zarka!”
He shouted the last word in half mocking exaltation, and as he ended the apostrophe the spectral form seemed to bend over him and the cloudy presence to surround and envelop him. It was but the vapour descending as the sun gradually lost its power, just as the apparition had been but the familiar spectre of the mountains.
Nevertheless Zarka seemed, with a gambler’s superstition, to regard it as an omen and an answer to his profane prayer. He threw back his head and stretched his arms as though he would embrace what was but his own shadow. Then, with a more practical impulse, he snatched up his gun, and ran quickly on along the path, racing the great cumuli which were rolling down from the mountain tops. He had started only just in time, and, familiar with the way, was able to keep in front of the pursuing obscurity. Soon he reached in safety the dividing ground between the snow and the commencing line of vegetation. Here all was bright and warm once more. Zarka, pausing with the air of a man who has won his race, looked backwards up towards the rolling mists and laughed.
“Just in time! A few seconds more of apostrophizing, and not even my tutelar deity or demon could have saved me from an uncomfortable night. Well, I shall enjoy my dinner all the more from the knowledge that I very nearly missed it. May I be as lucky elsewhere!”
He went on, soon plunging down into the sloping forest, and leisurely making his way homewards.
CHAPTER XV
THE EYES IN THE CLEFT
The giant trees of the great forest streaked the velvety glades with their lengthening shadows as the autumn sun touched the broken outline of the mountain screen and sent the last of its blaze sweeping through the valley and flooding its alleys with purple light. A solitary ray, finding, as it were, the clue to the maze where the forest was thickest, stretched with insistent brilliance across a natural arbour which lay in the most sheltered recesses of the woodland depths. This somewhat abnormal feature of the sylvan region reared itself in a hollow a score of paces from one of the forest paths, and was formed in the largest of the rocks which here for a space of perhaps fifty yards square bulged out and reared themselves, a rough excrescence on the plush-like ground, and, as it might seem, an outpost of the huge battalions towering in their grandeur but a short league away.
On one side of this rocky dell the overhanging escarpment formed a shallow recess, and in this, on the rough bench afforded by a ledge of rock, sat Philippa and Von Tressen. The light falling athwart the retreat and intercepted and split up by the sharp angles of the projecting roof, just tinged with a stray glimmer the girl’s gold-brown hair and sparkled in the jewel on the hand which lay on her lover’s arm. They had met that afternoon by arrangement, and Philippa had chosen the way to that secluded spot as lying in a part of the forest where riding was hardly practicable, and so out of Count Zarka’s beat. Von Tressen had divined the reason and gently taxed her with it.