“Till death do us part?” he said.
“Nay, Kahikatea,” she returned, “for ever and ever. Here, in this very place, in an age gone by did I plight my troth to you, and here again——”
I dashed on, the light of my torch blurred before my eyes, up through the tunnel towards the marble cave, whither I knew the chief had gone. When I came to the hewn steps I saw him striding before me; I flung aside my torch and followed, gaining the uncertain border of daylight and darkness, whence I could see into the cave, just as he reached the entrance.
There before him stood the statue of Hinauri, immovable, silent, all white, with arms outstretched. With a quick step he stood before her and looked into her eyes. There was no colour there. The living hues had fled. The tohunga’s lips quivered. He stretched forth a hand and touched her reverently upon the arm. It was cold stone.
Then despair crowded in upon his heart, and a terrible sorrow came upon his face. Anguish drew deep lines beneath his eyes, and the power of his presence dropped from him. His great chest shook convulsively, and he gave way to a grief as awful to behold as his savage triumph in the abyss. He prostrated himself at her feet and mingled the tears of his agony with the white dust of the floor. Raising himself upon his knees, he held up his arms and implored her to come back. With bitterness he reproached himself as the cause of this sad end to all his hopes. His words grew fierce against himself. He raved wildly, and addressed heart-broken appeals to the statue; but Hinauri answered not, nor pitied the Maori in his grief.
At last it was driven home into his tortured soul that the end had come. He had failed to do her bidding, and she was changed again to stone for ever. He stayed his wild woe and stood motionless, his face calm, his form erect, and in his eyes the splendid sadness of a god in pain. As he stood there the aspect of Zun the Terrible deepened on him. The sorrowful longing on the face of the Twelfth Tohunga was his again.
I could not stand there and look calmly on when a word of mine might explain the trick that had been unwittingly played upon him. My foot was on the step before me, and I was about to rush forward, when again a cold blast of air struck me in the face, again the thrill darted down my spine; my flesh crept and my hair rose. I was rooted to the spot. Then, far within my brain, the Great Tohungas of the Earth spoke a second time: “Let him alone! It is our will—the will of the One above us. This man is worthy of correction—may you be as worthy in your sin. In ages past, to trick the giants of evil, he substituted the False for the True, to protect the True; and now it comes back upon him in like manner, and he is tricked. Let him alone!”
Such words as these took shape within me, and I could neither speak to him nor move to his aid. As I stood shuddering helplessly, his mood changed, and he began to pace fiercely up and down the cave, passing and re-passing through the broad flood of twilight that came through the opening, and fell upon the face of the marble image.
“Ngha! she has withdrawn into the sky,” he said. “I will go to her, and she shall not return when I am one. It is but a stone that is here. It shall not remain. The world shall see the Bright One no more. It is the end; it is the end.”
He disappeared in the darkness of the inner cave, and came out again with a weapon, a heavy meré of the broad-leaf kind. Whirling this above his head, he paced to and fro, again chanting the long toil of his life. Now he stopped before the image and whirled the weapon within an inch of the lovely face.