I laughed in reply. I was becoming infected with my host’s happiness.
“Do you talk Maori?” I asked, as we found Tiki finishing his meal beneath the cedars; “this fellow can’t speak a word of English.”
“No, I can’t,” he replied, “but Crystal can. She’ll put him through his facings in the morning. Where shall we bed him down, in the barn or in the hay loft?”
“I think a bundle of straw in the corner of the verandah would be a luxury to him.”
“Right! you wait here. I’ll soon fix him up.” And he disappeared, to return presently with a lantern and a large bundle of straw which he deposited in the most sheltered part of the verandah, where, following my instructions, Tiki made his bed and turned in. We then went inside the house; and when, after a long, earnest talk, my host had shown me into the best bedroom, he said “Good-night,” and retired to rest.
Until long after everything was quiet I leaned upon the window-sill gazing at the stars, and basking in the atmosphere of happiness which had fallen upon that house. The cloth of gold roses that clustered round the window gave a faint odour, which stole softly out upon the quiet air, for the night wind had died away in the blue-gums, and the garden below was very still. The sound of a breaking twig, the sighing of the guilty aspen as its leaves turned restlessly in their sleep, the chirping of a cricket on the lawn, the munching of the horses in the stable, the hooting of an owl in the plantation, and the baying of a shepherd’s dog on the hills—these were the sounds that emphasised the stillness of the night. But suddenly, from far away, came the faint refrain of a wild, heathenish chant, rising and falling on the still night air in weird, barbaric changes. As I listened it chilled my blood, breaking through the sweet, happy silence of the place like a note of horror. I knew it came from the direction of Cazotl’s yacht. With a shudder I closed the window to shut it out.
CHAPTER XIII.
CRYSTAL GREY.
So long accustomed to rise at the first signs of day, I was unable to break myself of the habit suddenly. Consequently, according to long custom, I awoke next morning just as the faint grey of dawn was appearing above the eastern hills. To wake and to get up were the same thing to a man of my abandoned restlessness. In less than twenty minutes, therefore, I was dressed. Picking a dew-covered rose-bud from the clusters about the window, I went downstairs fastening it in my buttonhole, passed out at the front door, and on to the verandah.
Taking the opposite direction from that in which Tiki had retired for the night, I found my way round the verandah to the back corner of the house, where, beneath heavy festoons of flowering vines, some wooden steps led down into a well-planned wilderness of a garden. There I roamed beneath the trees in the dim light and strange hush of early dawn. The faint twittering of a thousand birds came from the tall native trees that walled the place in from the outer world. It was a wonderful garden, and had evidently been laid out by some early settler with English ideas, long before Dreamer Grey came to the place. There were well-worn paths between umbrageous native matapo, titoki, and ngaio; and leaf-strewn sward beneath isolated fruit trees, which were quite forty years old.
Wandering about in this old-world garden, with now a glimpse of the rosy sky between the wall of native trees, and now the taste of a plum or cherry that hung low on the dewy branch, I came at length upon a curious grove of hazels planted in short rows, at right angles to a hawthorn hedge in such a way as to form a suite of five or six rustic rooms, roofed above by the arching boughs of the nut trees, walled in behind by the hedge, and screened from the rest of the garden in front by the drooping foliage of some branches trained for the purpose.