I rose and walked round the verandah, sick at heart. It was as I had feared. That infernal wizard had, without a doubt, gleaned all our plans from Tiki while in the obedient condition, and then sent him home to sleep, with the assurance that on waking he would remember nothing of what had taken place from the moment he fell under his influence up to the time he came out of it. There was but one conclusion to all this. Cazotl had sailed for Golden Bay to await our arrival.
CHAPTER XVII.
LOVE AT SECOND SIGHT.
It was the last day at the home of Crystal, and it was the last day, too, of my fool’s paradise, from which I was driven by a fact as startling as a flaming sword. Love at first sight was a thing I well understood, but love at ‘second sight’ was a matter which before that day I should have rejected as a wild impossibility—a thing to be sworn to only by a class of visionaries who will swear to anything, even on hearsay, provided it be sufficiently marvellous. The tale of my love at first sight, its beginning, its hopes, its fears, and its fate—not its ending—may be inferred from the brief attention I have called to it here and there in this history of adventure; but Crystal Grey’s love at ‘second sight’ for another, whom she had never seen in the flesh, but who stood none the less surely between her and me, must be told in detail.
It was scarcely surprising that a deep love which sprang up in full tide in the brief space that it requires for the senses to transmit an image to the brain and impress its meaning on the heart, should not flow silently for very long. Up to the day of which I write it had not entered Crystal’s mind that she was as a goddess in my eyes; it had not occurred to her that when, filled with thoughts of the great happiness which I, as a mere instrument in the hands of a loving Providence, had brought her, she let her dark eyes meet mine with the warm regard of a pure soul in them, I should be blinded by love into the fatal conclusion that she could return my love. But something occurred to Grey. That very morning, as we stood alone on the verandah after breakfast, he had said to me: “Warnock, my friend, I like you—I seem to have known you a long, long time. Listen to me. I have found my daughter; Heaven may will it that I shall find my wife; and then, when times are more settled, it may chance that, in the man who will have been instrumental in restoring these two greatest blessings, I may find a son.” He placed his hand on my arm, as he added with a smile, “My dear boy, I know what I am talking about. I may have forgotten nearly half of my life, but I can see what I can see. Speak to her, Warnock. Speak to her, my dear boy. Nothing would please me more than to call you my son.” With a final hearty clap on my shoulder he left me wondering how on earth he could have found out what I had revealed only to the stars and the setting sun. It is strange how people in love fancy that no one can know the fact until they are told.
So I spoke to Crystal, and in accordance with the matter-of-fact bed-rock of my nature, I did not waste many words in doing it. After spending most of the day in reviewing mazes of words which might possibly hold my feelings and convey them, I scattered everything to the winds, emptied my brain, and, with a full heart, strode down to the nut-trees, where I stood before her with my hat in my hand and said, “Crystal! I want to tell you something.”
She looked a little surprised at my first use of her Christian name, but, looking up, said sweetly, “What is it, Wanaki?”
“It is this,” I said. “I love you more than anything else in the world: so much that—that——”
I paused, for a look of pain flitted across her brow and the colour left her cheeks. She rose from her seat and stood facing me, with a soft, despairing sorrow in her eyes, while to her lovely face was added a sadness that made it more lovely still; for even in that moment, while I seemed plunged for ever into outer darkness, the sweet soul of tender pity and pain suffusing the face of the woman I loved was like balm to my crushed spirit.
“Wanaki, oh, Wanaki!” she said, “I am more sorry than I can say. I owe you everything, but I cannot return your love. Oh! I could take my heart out and crush it for what it tells me—that I cannot turn it to you: that I cannot love you, Wanaki.”
Her words sounded in my ears like a plaintive lament sung over my dead hopes, over the ashes of my heart. I knew not what to say; for awhile I stood dumb, trying to conceal my pain. But she, watching me with anxious eyes, searched it out, and turned away with a low moan. Her bosom heaved beneath her white dress—I knew it was with sorrow for me—but she said no more.