“There is something you have kept back. Almost my only memory besides that of my mother’s face is what I think must have been an image carved out of marble, all white and beautiful. Did you see any such thing?”
“No, I did not see what you speak of, but I saw Ngaraki hold up his arms and gaze—like the Twelfth Tohunga I have told you about—up through the darkness to something which he knew was far above, and I judged from the chief’s manner that the object he was addressing was sublime and beautiful.”
There was a silence, during which Crystal was evidently engaged in trying to recall more of this earliest memory, while I was considering whether, if I spoke of Kahikatea’s experience, I should be breaking my promise to Te Makawawa. At length, proceeding on the argument that his discovery was independent of the old chief’s revelations, I concluded that I was on safe ground.
I said, “Now that you have mentioned the matter, I might tell you that I have a friend who says he has seen that beautiful image in a high cave in the mountain. How he got there I hardly know, and how he got out again he does not know himself, but he says he saw the marble statue of a lovely woman, young—almost a girl. She was standing near the mouth of the cave with her arms outstretched, as if to some vision in the western sky, and on her face was stamped a divine and radiant beauty, while her form, still and cold, yet full of motion, seemed ready to spring to life at a touch. The prayers of all women who lift their eyes unto the hills were upon her lips. The sightless eyes derived their love-light from the longing expressed by the whole figure yearning forward to some glorious future of our race when——”
I paused, for while I had been speaking Crystal’s hands had clasped themselves together in her lap, a rapt look had come to her eyes, and my thoughts wandered from the statue. However beautiful, however dazzling it might be, it could not be more so than this girl before me. Therefore, as I said, my thoughts wandered from the statue; I paused and she, with a start, turned her eyes upon me with looks of serious wonder.
“What a symbol of the ideal woman!” she said. “All white—standing far above the world—waiting, with a prayer upon her lips, for the dawn of a brighter day. She is the higher self of all women who wait and pray, and try to be white. What did your friend think?”
“He thought just what you think. Indeed, he even went so far as to fall madly in love with that ideal woman in his own strange, poetical style, and he now swears he will find his way to that cave to look upon her face again. Pygmalion and Galatea make a very pretty story between them, but don’t you think it’s rather a wild kind of poetry for a man of the nineteenth century to love a stone?”
She smiled a sweet, sad smile at one of the little leaves overhead, as it opened and shut its tiny door against the blue. “Surely it is not the stone your poetical friend has fallen in love with,” she said presently; “it is the beauty and meaning depicted on that stone—how, and by whom, is a mystery.”
The breakfast bell rang vigorously from the verandah, and covered the silence with which I greeted her last remark. It was not because I saw any reason for secrecy that I kept this part of Te Makawawa’s secret, but simply because it had been tacitly understood between him and me that it was not a matter for repetition.
Crystal rose from the hammock, and saying that her father would be waiting for us, led the way towards the house.