My reflections were cut short by the reappearance of Crystal with the picture.
“See!” she said, holding it up to the full light; “that is the man who roared out the words. Why—what is—oh! Mr. Warnock, what is the matter?”
I had turned from the picture with a gasp, and had sat down on the wooden bench with my face buried in my hands. I looked up as she repeated her words and saw mingled bewilderment and concern on her lovely face.
“It is the face of a fiend,” I said, “not of a man.”
“But why are you so strange? And why do you clench your teeth like that? You’re as pale as death—surely, Wanaki, the face of a fiend on canvas cannot be so terrible to look at!”
“It is the face of a fiend,” I repeated fiercely, half beside myself with maddening fears, “not of a man.”
It was the face of Cazotl. And, in those evil features, I traced a resemblance which had eluded me on my first sight of the Mexican in the flesh—a resemblance to the bold granite features of the chief of the Vile Tohungas of the Pit, so fiercely cursed by Ngaraki.
Very weird to me was this strange, circumstantial suggestion that the legendary chief of the Vile Tohungas had returned to be the actual head of a brotherhood whose aims and objects were identical with those of ancient time. Yet forcible and valid seemed the conception that as the guardians of Hinauri had brought their protecting curses down from the remotest past, so her enemies, who, although driven far into the north as the aged chief had said, had preserved their continuity as a Vile Brotherhood through the ages, had handed on even into the present their hatred of the Pure One, always with the aim of destroying her or causing her to forget her Sign of Power. For awhile my shrewd, practical scepticism struggled against a strong unity of evidence derived independently from different sources. The aged chief’s belief that the Vile Ones would return, Crystal’s dream picture of the Destroyers of Women, the undeniable resemblance of their chief to Cazotl and to the granite image in the abyss—these things pointed my mind to strange conclusions; but when I reviewed the conflicting purposes of the Good and the Vile of ancient time and identified them with the conflicting purposes of Ngaraki and Cazotl, I was for a moment almost tempted to throw my common-sense to the winds and say that the ancient giants of the two priesthoods had returned again and again to the earth to continue the fierce struggle begun at the very foundations of the world. But if Cazotl were the arch enemy of Ngaraki and the would-be destroyer of Hinauri, why should he have appeared to Crystal Grey in a dream? And why, again, should he seem to be in pursuit of her? A vague apprehensive shuddering within me was the only answer to these questions.
CHAPTER XV.
THE DARKNESS PUTS FORTH A TENTACLE.
That night, long after the house was quiet, I remained leaning on the sill of my bedroom window, looking down on the peaceful garden below and turning matters over in my mind. The night wind sighed and died away in faint puffs upon the trees. A midnight hush was falling upon everything—a midnight hush and something more: great black clouds were banking up seaward, and the roses round my window were sending out heavy odours, such as flowers do before a thunderstorm. The air became sultry as the inky clouds banked higher and higher. Then the land wind fell altogether and dead silence ensued, in which I could hear the titoki-berries opening on their little hinges, and a strange sound of a going in the high tops of the native trees in the plantation, while always the leaves of the aspens tossed and turned in sad unrest.