Yet he continued to help her along, and presently, when her nausea and dizziness passed and she was able to walk without stumbling, he picked up Véronique and carried her. He was very gentle with the little girl whom his wife had nursed, and hope for Véronique, if not for William and Nat and herself, gave Marianne fresh energy. Yet even so, the journey was a nightmare of mental agony that she would never forget. It was all her own fault. Why had William and Tai Haruru and dear old Nat suffered her all these years? Why had they given in to her? They should have taken her pride and smashed it before it smashed them. “All thy waves and storms are gone over me.” No, not all of them yet. Terrible as the pain was now, there must be much more yet to come. And she would welcome it and not flinch. She deserved it to the last drop.
They passed the little village in the forest where Kapua-Manga and Hine-Moa lived, and Marianne saw that it was deserted. Evidently the villagers feared the Red Garment and had taken refuge deeper in the forest.
They journeyed on and on, and the sun rose high above the great tree-tops. Walking along the narrow track through the tall ferns the heat was suffocating. Véronique, riding most of the time on Kapua-Manga’s back, kept fresh and cool, but Marianne was nearly dropping with exhaustion. Her feet were swollen and her head throbbing, and her heavy European clothes clogged her every movement. Yet she walked as steadily as she could, with head erect, remembering that to bear herself as bravely as she could, whatever happened, was just now the only reparation it was in her power to make. They halted at midday beside a stream that ran through the fern, and Kapua-Manga brought them water in a gourd and some round cakes that Véronique ate eagerly. Marianne had to force herself to eat, but she drank the water with gratitude and bathed her swollen feet in the stream.
“Maui-Potiki?” she said once more to Kapua-Manga, when Véronique was out of hearing. “Is he alive?”
But still he kept silence, and her heart sank, because with the Maori people silence generally means dissent.
They rested through the worst heat of the day and then went on again, and soon for Marianne the mental pain was blessedly dulled by the physical. She became aware of nothing at all except the aching body that by sheer will power must be dragged over the ground. Then came another rest and another start, and presently the physical distress was less severe and she seemed to herself to become a sort of walking machine. Her body became adjusted to the rhythm of pain and effort, and she moved like a sleep walker. They camped that night beside a stream, and when she had wrapped the blanket that Kapua-Manga brought her round herself and Véronique she was asleep almost before she knew it.
The next day’s travel was easier, because now and again Kapua-Manga and another Maori made a chair of their arms and carried her. Though he still would not speak to her, Kapua-Manga was roughly kind.
Late in the third day she found that she had got her second wind and was noticing the way they were going. She had never been as far in the forest as this before, and the intensity of its depth and power touched her to awe. The trees here rose to such a height above her that there was no sky to be seen, and the light fell dimly, suffused, tinctured by the filigree of leaves that had admitted it, with just a faint coolness, a faint sparkling of amber dust in the green, to tell of the sunset that far away above their heads must be burning along the bare mountaintops. Though she could not see them, Marianne’s second sense was aware of those mountains, godlike in constancy, that were the perpetual theme of the landscape in this country, and the thought of them steadied her in the awful depths of this tropic green. The ferns, now, were like a green sea flowing in from a distance so far away that its existence could not be grasped by the mind, flowing with a movement slight but inexorable, that spared for the moment only the bright cavalcade winding in and out between its billows that were piled up poised and trembling, as the waters of Jordan were poised above the ranks of the Egyptians before they fell and swept them to annihilation.
Against that background the feathered heads of the Maoris, their weapons and clean-cut limbs, were so clearly etched that it seemed to Marianne that she saw each separate thread of each separate feather, each drop of light upon each spearpoint, every ripple of every muscle beneath the polished skin. Death is abroad, she thought. It is death that makes life live. Soon, in a moment now, the waves will fall.
But if death hovered over this place the descent was not yet. The fern swept not down but away, showing an islet rising up out of its green like a child’s sand castle on the shore. A small hill in the forest had been cleared of its trees, and a pa had been erected on its summit, with the thatched roofs of a village clustering below. The ground immediately round the village had been cleared and planted with potatoes. Pigs rooted peacefully under the trees, dogs lay sleeping before the doors of the houses, and smoke curled lazily up from the chimney openings in the thatched roofs. The clear space overhead was itself like a chimney in the great green roof of the forest. Through it the golden light poured down and one could see, at last, the blessed sky, and the heavenly rose-flushed peak of a mountain. The women and children were all indoors preparing the evening meal, and stillness brooded over the village.
Then one of the Maoris raised his tetere and blew a blast upon it, and instantly the whole village wakened to life. Women and children came running from the houses, dogs barked, pigs squealed. Most of the Maori warriors ran toward their houses, shouting lustily, but Kapua-Manga and five others, surrounding Marianne and Véronique and keeping off the importunate curiosity of the Maori women at spear’s length, led them away from the village and up the steep path to the pa.
“Where are we going, Mamma?” whispered Véronique, pulling at Marianne’s skirts. “Where are Papa and Nat?”
“It’s all right, darling,” said Marianne gaily. “Soon we shall all be together again.”
Yet she felt anything but gay as they passed in through the narrow opening in the outer wall of the pa, the peke-rangi, already guarded by four warriors in full war paint, and crossed the plank across the first ditch. If the forest had seemed asphyxiating, what would it be like to be shut up within these wooden walls? There were three of them, of great strength, lashed with toro-toro, and three ditches so deep that warriors could stand in them with faces level with the ground and fire through the loopholes in the fences. Inside was an open space on the summit of the little hill, where the whole community would gather if attacked, and in the center of it were the ruins of an earlier village, overgrown with bushes, with two raupo-walled, reed-thatched houses still standing intact at some little distance from each other. Marianne remembered that William had told her that in earlier days the villages were always built within the walls of the pa, but now, when there was less fighting between the tribes, they built them beside their potato fields. She and Véronique were pushed inside one of the houses, and then their escort abruptly disappeared. Holding hands in the dimness, they looked about them. There were no windows, but there was a fireplace made of four flat stones sunk edgeways in the ground, and fresh fern was piled on the floor. Two bright, clean native blankets were laid on the fern, and beside them was a gourd of water and a dish of sweet potatoes, with dried fish laid daintily on top. The sight of the fresh fern, the clean blankets, and the carefully prepared food gave a sense of welcome that eased Marianne’s misery and made Véronique suddenly laugh and clap her hands.
“A picnic!” cried Marianne, quick to echo and encourage the little girl’s mood. “What fun. We’ll carry it outside, shall we? It’s too hot to eat in here.”
They carried the food and blankets outside and sat down together on the threshold of the little house. They ate and drank, and then, sitting on one blanket with the other pulled over them because the evening was growing cool, they wound their arms about each other and waited for what should come next. The excitement of the village came to them only as a distant murmur. They could see nothing at all above the high wooden fences except the tops of the forest tr
ees, the beautiful clear evening sky, and that one mountain peak flushed with the sunset. As they waited, Marianne gazed at the mountain peak and suddenly felt more hopeful, for it was like a presence watching over them. . . . And the preparations made for their comfort in the little house did not look like the work of an enemy. . . . She looked down at Véronique and found that the little girl was fast asleep.
Exhausted as she was, she must have slept too, for with a sudden start she was aware of a cricked neck and aching limbs, and, looking about her, found the ruins of the little village lying in shadow. Over her head the sky was a deep, translucent green. The sunset fires had left the mountain peak, and its snow glittered coldly beneath the diamond spikes of the first star. The village was utterly still; but some sound, she thought, had awakened her. She listened and it came again, the faint crackling of burning wood beyond the thick bushes that separated her little house from that other on the far side of the ruined village. So she and Véronique were not here alone after all. Who was it here with them? Kapua-Manga? She must know before she slept again.
She laid the deeply sleeping Véronique down upon the blankets and crept forward through the bushes, guided by the faint glow of the fire, until she could peep from behind a ruined raupo wall and see the other house. A fire of twigs had been lit just outside its door, and between her and the fire a man sat brooding, his silhouette dark against the flames. He sat bowed down as though with sorrow, head bent, but there was a suggestion of power in the heavy, slumped figure that look her back instantly to the moonlit night on the verandah when she had seen William sitting just so and had marveled that so weak a man could give her such a sense of strength. It was the same now. Almost before she had realized that the man sitting was William himself, she knew fleetingly that she was saved.
“William! William!” she cried, and did not know how she got over the uneven ground that separated her from him.
He got to his feet, peered a moment, then held out his arms with a great bellow of joy strangled midway lest the Maori guard at the peke-rangi should hear it. Even in the twilight dimness she could see how his face was on fire with a delight and thankfulness near to ecstasy. Never, in all their life together, had he given her a welcome of such spontaneous joy. “Véronique is safe,” she said as she ran into his arms. It was perhaps the only unselfish utterance of her life.
“Nat, too,” said William. “He’s here, asleep in the hut. Holy Moses! My darling girl, my precious darling girl, how in the world did you get here?”
Then he stifled any possibility of reply with passionate kisses, and nearly smashed her ribs in with the warmth of his hug. She would not have cared if he had. This was the embrace she had expected on board the Green Dolphin. This was what she had always longed for. This, at last, was the satisfaction of her lifelong hunger. For one perfect moment she was utterly happy. She pressed herself against him as though she would have forced her being into his, lost her own identity in his. What did it matter if they were soon to die a hideous death? She would not care, for life, after all, had not defrauded her. She had had her moment of supreme and perfect joy.
“Véronique safe, you said? Not hurt at all?”
It was his first coherent utterance since he had taken her into his arms. A little while ago it would have plunged her into jealousy, now it plunged her into a fresh paroxysm of self-loathing. . . . For just for the moment she had forgotten Véronique, thrust into such deadly danger by her fault. . . . She broke into a storm of tears, her hands covering her face as she leaned against his breast.
“Forgive me, William. It’s all my fault. I would not go to Wellington. I made you put up that stupid stockade.”
“No more of that, girl,” said William gently. “If you were headstrong, I was weak. Nothing to choose between us. Where’s Véronique? Not for one moment must she be left unguarded.”
They made their way back to the other hut, where Véronique slept in her blanket, watched by the spiked star above the snow mountain. She woke when her father lifted her, gave a sleepy cry of joy, and wound her arms tightly round his neck.
“A grand joke, this, eh sweetheart?” he whispered to her. “A regular Green Dolphin Country adventure, eh?”
She laughed and yawned. “Where’s Nat?” she asked. “Nat and Captain O’Hara?”
“I’m taking you to Nat,” said William. “Captain O’Hara’s gone down to the village for a drink.”
Marianne stumbled along a few paces behind her husband and child as they made their way back to the other hut and the gay crackling bonfire, vaguely aware that they had entered some private country of their own where she did not belong. Yet she felt no sense of resentment, for she was still drowned in humility. If she was outlawed, she deserved it.
“Nat! Wake up, Nat!” cried William. “Come out, old fellow. See what I’ve got here.”
And Nat appeared in the low entrance to the hut, on all fours like a wizened old monkey, a bandage made from the tail of William’s shirt bound about one leg. He scrambled to his feet, rubbed his eye, gazed and gazed again, grinned, and relapsed into soft and thankful profanity that progressed by easy stages, as he took Véronique from her father’s arms, into those gentle hissing noises that denoted with him the utmost and most supreme content.
But he would not permit that Marianne should be outlawed, and his one eye sought hers above Véronique’s golden head, drawing her out of the shadows into the charmed light of the crackling fire. “Good evening to ye, ma’am,” he said with an ordinariness so delightful that quite suddenly the little house, the fire, the high wooden walls that shut them in, the treetops above, and the mountain peak with the bright star impaled upon its summit, were to the four of them home.
2
With William and Marianne this sense of security did not survive the night. They awoke sore and cramped, and cold in spite of the sun-warmed golden air that showered down upon them out of a clear sky. It was also disturbing to have their morning meal brought to them by a silent Hine-Moa who would not meet their eyes. The meal was piping hot and as carefully prepared as that of the night before, and she brought also two large calabashes of water, but she would not speak to them and her eyes were inflamed with weeping. “Hine-Moa!” they cried to her, but she shook her head and turned away, stumbling over the rough ground. When they had washed and eaten, they left Nat to amuse Véronique and strolled away out of earshot. Then Marianne sat on a fallen tree trunk while William prospected.
“As I thought,” he said when he returned. “There is still a guard posted at the peke-rangi. And since you came, it has been increased from four to six.” He smiled at her as he sat down beside her and took her hand. “They seem to think you the equal of two men, my dear. And so you are. A darn stout-hearted courageous woman. I said I’d like to adventure with you in the bush one day. Remember?”
“But not like this,” said Marianne, gripping his hand hard. “Not like this.” Her voice died out and she hung her head, looking at their intertwined fingers. For however courageous she might be in this mess, it would remain her own self-will that had got them into it.
“I’ll tell you how I got here,” said William suddenly, for the spectacle of Marianne in this condition of humility was so startling as to be almost disturbing. “Nat and I were here a good twenty-four hours before you and Véronique. It was a bad business, Marianne, when they saw that weak place in the stockade and rushed it. They were too many for us. Scant was killed, and the other fellows too, I shouldn’t wonder. I wish I knew what had happened to Isaac. Good fellows, all of them. They stabbed Nat in the leg, but not badly, and Jacky-Poto knocked me silly with a blow on the head with the butt end of his gun. Seemed as though they must have wanted to save Nat and me alive. Next thing I knew we were in the forest, traveling pretty fast, Nat and I carried in litters, with our hands tied. Jacky-Poto was in charge, but he’d not speak or even look at me; and he’d taken my Maori knife from me; I saw it in his
belt. As soon as I was myself again, I rolled out of the litter, kicked out and refused to budge, but there were so many of them they just picked me up like a carcass of a dead ox and carried me along, and in the end I just legged it with the rest. They tied us up at night, but otherwise they treated us well. They fed us and let me attend to Nat’s leg. But we were just about crazy, thinking of you and Véronique, and all those good fellows dead, and getting no answer to any of our questions. I never ought to have brought you out here, my girl. The country’s too raw, too savage. Forgive me. I’d have done better to leave you on the Island.”
“No,” said Marianne. “I was never so happy as when you took me in your arms last night. It was the best moment of my whole life. If I am to die now, I thought, at least I have had one perfect moment. I am still happy. Happier than I have ever been.”
He looked at her strangely. To make her happy had been his life’s work for years past. Odd if he should apparently be succeeding at the very moment of her greatest danger and discomfort. Women were queer cattle.
“What’ll they do to us, William?” she asked him, but with more curiosity than dread, so armored against misfortune was she by her joy. “Why have Hine-Moa and Kapua-Manga and Jacky-Poto turned against us in this way? It is all so puzzling.”
“This is how I see it, girl,” said William steadily. “The feeling against the white man is very bitter now, so bitter that even Kapua-Manga and Hine-Moa and Jacky-Poto have had their loyalty to us submerged by it. You can’t wonder at that. Race feeling is bound to be a stronger thing than affection for strangers of just a few years’ growth. And this tribe here is their tribe, with the right to command them, and this tribe is so hot against the white man that it has taken the trouble to go a three days’ journey through the forest to attack the nearest white settlement. And mind you, Marianne, they’ve shown great courage, for they’re likely to bring down upon themselves a pretty severe vengeance. We’re not far over the Maori frontier here, if we’re over it at all, and the Red Garment, marching from Wellington, could find this pa and wipe it out without putting itself to too much trouble.”
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