I handed her back the cameo, saying, “Neither will I attempt to stand between you and yours, while you love it as you do.”
There was a pause, in which Crystal remained looking straight before her as if she had not heard my last words. Presently she turned to me with a perplexed expression and asked quickly:
“Why did you compare him to your friend? Why did you start when you saw his face? Why did you—Wanaki! there is something you are hiding from me.”
She stood before me, her bosom heaving with emotions that showed upon her face as pain and joy struggling together. I saw that it was useless for me to attempt to conceal what her quick intuition had already grasped.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I would have concealed it from you, because you would be happier not to know it. But my tongue carried me too far. The face you have shown me is the face of my friend Kahikatea, who has renounced the love of woman for love of a symbol of pure womanhood—an ideal beauty wrought upon a piece of cold marble which he has seen, and you have seen, in the mountain cave where you were born.”
The struggle between joy and pain upon her face came to an end, and joy sat there triumphant in her eyes.
“Oh! you have explained the meaning of his face. His love is far above the world. I see in his eyes the prayers of all great men for something more divine in woman—the demand for some higher strength and beauty of being than has hitherto been required of us. Ah! Wanaki, if one woman can do anything in this great world, I will see that the prayer of the man I love shall be answered to some extent in the hearts of women.”
On the plane of this high love she was safe, but I knew that there would be times when her more direct and personal love for Kahikatea would rebel against the fact that she herself was to him merely as one in a great multitude. She did not know, neither did I tell her, that although Kahikatea never lost sight of the symbolic meaning he had attached to Hinauri, yet he, in his turn, had a direct and personal love for Hinauri herself. Once, when we had been discussing that part of the legend which told of her return in the future he had said, “You call my fascination a piece of extravagant poetry, a love for a mere abstraction, but I tell you, Warnock, that if the marble Hinauri were suddenly transformed into a living woman, she would still be my ideal, but at the same time as real to me as any woman can be to the man who loves her.” Had I told Crystal flatly that the man whom she loved loved another, I could not have put more accurately what I knew; but not wishing to lessen the power of her resolve to work her love out in the world, I merely said: “Your nature is good and strong: you will carry out your resolve in the way that your star directs, but for myself, you must forgive me if during our journey north I am a sadder, if a better, man for this great love of mine.”
She looked at me sorrowfully, while a tear came from the black depths of those eyes of night and glistened in her lashes. It trembled and fell. She turned in silence and passed out through the screen of leaves. That tear was more to me than any words could have conveyed.