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Wellington opened 1855 with an earthquake on either side of Cook Strait, so that great rocks fell and rifts ran in the brown earth. This being something that even Wellington had not thought of before, Jermyn went down in one of Peregrine's traders to find that the sea had courteously presented the little town with quite a quantity of new land such as Auckland would have given anything for. Pioneers, being so used to ups and downs, were much less upset than the Colonial Office which (feeling the country becoming far too lively) dealt with it so rigorously that the papers were all headlines and Judge Stephens granted an injunction against the whole British Government.

Tiffany didn't care what they did. Roddy had gone to the farm and taken the sun with him. A very disconsolate Tiffany, snatching all possible moments from bed-making and sewing and cooking to sit at Major Henry's table poring over those ancient leather volumes which could not quiet the growing turbulence in her mind although directing it down so many and varied paths that even she should have been satisfied. Major Henry, feeling electricity in the air, snuffed and patted the wolfhounds and felt that maiden meditation, even in so pretty a creature as Tiffany, could go too far.

“Take it easy, my girl,” he advised. “We Lovels are apt to be too intense.”

“I can't laugh and sing without Roddy. I want to know why people died for their religions,” declared Tiffany, thrusting back the bronze ringlets that were page 210 always getting astray from nets, looking with great brown tragic eyes.

“Twaddle, my dear,” said the Major, comfortably. “Wait till the beaux begin to come.”

They had begun long ago, but even to think of them in anyone's presence tied Tiffany's tongue with shyness. Hew Garcia and Tom Hepburn, gawky, speechless, damp about the palms, sentimentally languishing in corners like other adolescent males. Hemi, fiery and eloquent in the fern-gully, desperately marshalling all his Begats against her white blood until the Englishman in him suddenly flung the Maori to the winds and he swore to become all-white for Tihane's sake.

“See Tihane. I am now clerk in my father's office on the wharf. I can read and write the English and do figures….”

More than figures met Hemi in that office where he found two races of mariner forefathers greeting him. Gaunt unconquerable toas—the great chiefs of all time—directing that fearful journey from Tahiti in open canoes lashed together, conning their way by stars, by the instinct of born navigators to that far lovely legendary isle found by Rupe before William the Conqueror was king. Old English sea-dogs, now lambent with romance, driving their little staggering ships over all the world's horizons, fighting, trading, rollicking, loving, conquering from Pole to Pole.

When Corny sang “Ye Mariners of England,” as he so often did in the outer office, Hemi couldn't bear it.

“‘As ye sweep through the deep where the stormy winds do blow,’” bellowed Corny, looking up to see Hemi in the door. “Want anything, son?” he asked. But Hemi didn't know what he wanted. The call, though imperious, went back much too far for that.

“Get along with your job then, you lazy young devil,” said Corny pleasantly. He was proud of Hemi with his long English face and pale skin, his mighty muscles. page 211 When war came all his piebald brood would fight for England and it might be possible to get a commission for Hemi, thought Corny, ticking off the heavy greasy bundles of hides. If they didn't soon get a deep-water wharf, lighter expenses would eat up all the damned profits….

For Linda too there was trouble. Lieutenant Silk's overtures had been received with a tornado, which burst on poor Sir John.

“That creature Silk!” stormed Caroline. “Penniless infantry! Throw him out this moment, Sir John.”

“Oh, come now, Carry! The fellow's a gentleman….”

“This moment. Or I'll do it myself. Rag-tag riff-raff. No better than a bobtail cat. Hold your tongue, miss,” cried Caroline, boxing Linda's ears as she knelt with sky-blue flowing skirts and sky-blue flowing eyes imploring each parent in turn.

“Oh, papa,” went Linda, hoping against hope.

“Dang it, Carry…. I thought you were so anxious for husbands….”

“Of all the vulgarity! Really, I'm ashamed of you.” Caroline was frantic at the bare notion of Mr Andrew Greer being nipped in the bud like this. “Are you going, or must I meet the miscreant myself?” she demanded.

“Oh, very well. Very well,” said John, buttoning up his coat. Everything has a worser side. Silk, meeting Caroline towering in a cap bristling with scarlet velvet bows, would soon have found that out.

“Now, go to bed and stop that blubbing, Linda,” said Caroline, sitting down to write a cordial note to Mr Andrew Greer. Just a small kettledrum to-morrow night … so charmed to see you….” A shy young man, this Greer; but quite the English gentleman, bowing from the waist, and owner (declared Sir Winston) of over a million sheep. It is well that I have the wit to look after my daughters, thought Caroline, stamping the Lovel crest on a big blob of purple wax.

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What with tight stays and sobbings Linda's discomfort was such that she was sure only one thing could save her. So she wrote, “Come for me before they kill me,” folded the note, sealed it, and ran to the kitchen, where Mary's beau (himself a soldier) agreed so warmly to deliver the missive to the rightful hands that Mary was quite nasty about it. But Linda promised her a ribbon to hold her tongue, and slept peacefully, although the morning brought some fears. Yet not many; for it would be so delightful to be married and go about the country with her Silk, eating all the butter and sugar she liked and letting her stays out.

Upheld by this, Linda washed and ironed her white book-muslin in preparation for a bridal and thought of Lieutenant Silk riding up to the door on a great horse like the giaours who carried off the Zuleikas and Elviras of the “Keepsakes.” “Come, adored of my soul,” he would cry. When will he come? thought Linda, quite unable to imagine the desperation of Lieutenant Silk seeing his career sliding away from him on the one hand and his inamorata on the other.

To abduct a young lady in the teeth of his colonel and of Sir John Lovel was enough to soak any man in the dews of horror. But what lover could resist a cry of that dimension? Lieutenant Silk dressed as carefully as an aristocrat going to the guillotine and repaired, about midnight, to the gabled house where (from a respectful distance) he had so often watched the light go out in his lady's bower. Where to put the lady after she was abducted he had no idea. Perhaps Linda knew.

Sophia, who slept with Maria next to the slip of a room which enclosed Linda, woke in the night to strange sounds and ran to peep through the connecting door. There, at Linda's outer door, stood mamma, carrying a candle which turned her large nightcap and red flannel dressing-gown into the garniture of an ogress.

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“I heard voices,” said mamma, just like Joan of Arc. And then Sophia saw that the window was open, and Linda standing by it in a long white shawl with a man on his knees trying to put her feet into slippers. Neither spoke. They seemed spellbound by mamma, who was declaring that the unbelievable had happened, and she had believed it all along, and what did Linda think of herself now, miss? “Unhand her, villain,” cried Caroline, having also been brought up on “Keepsakes.”

Linda began to have hysterics, but for Lieutenant Silk there was no such refuge. “Madam,” he begged, dropping the slippers. “My dear madam….”

“Silence! What have you done to my innocent child? Tell me, monster, or I'll brain you…. Go into the other room this instant, Linda, or God will never forgive you.”

Linda knew that mamma must know much more about God than she did. Also she rather doubted His forgiveness herself if she eloped in her night-dress and curlpapers. All the romances, thought Linda, her sobs going off into wild laughter at her own spoilt one, managed things so much better. The candle-light presented Lieutenant Silk as a somewhat swarthy thick-set young man with heavy dark brows and a wide mouth. Fortunately it could not present the watery amoeba to which he felt himself inwardly turning.

“My angel … my dear madam …” he gasped.

“God will punish you for this, Linda,” cried Caroline, pushing Linda by the shoulders to the next room, where Sophia skipped behind the door just in time. “But what people will say, I cannot even imagine.”

“Save me! Save me!” screamed Linda, embarked on much louder hysterics than was possible with her stays on. Lieutenant Silk made such a jump that one heard the snap of his coat-tails. He swept Linda up in a long-armed clutch, bristling desperately at Caroline.

“No. You shan't. She's mine. She belongs to me.”

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“Be-lin-da?” shrieked Caroline in a perfect crescendo of questioning; and Linda, terrified for everything, became apostate to her love.

“I don't. I'm not. Mamma, mamma, don't look at me like that! We meant to marry … my white book-muslin … I w-w-washed it … oh, mamma!”

Taking refuge in her sex, Linda fainted, and even the distraught Lieutenant saw that the game was up. Yet, for all his fright, he was a man; so he took one kiss from those soft pouting lips before he laid her down and departed by the window with agility. If that old harridan chose to make a row he'd be cashiered—but what was that to the agonies his suffering angel would have to bear? “O just Heaven!” groaned Lieutenant Silk, mopping his forehead in the chill night and feeling that he had somehow got hold of the wrong epithet.

Recognizing the justice of heaven in making her its arbiter, Caroline summoned all her daughters together after breakfast and produced the cane. First Linda's spirit was to be publicly scourged, and then her flesh; and having got through the first with such success that each daughter was a weeping pulp of emotion, she summoned Linda to take off her bodice and kneel down. Who could possibly bear to think of Linda's chubby white flesh marked for weeks—perhaps for ever? Even Sophia, so partial to inner flagellations, joined her voice to her sisters bleating “Oh, please, mamma,” like frightened lambs.

Caroline unclasped her bracelets; and this, so eloquent of an executioner turning back his sleeves, brought all five Miss Lovels weeping to their knees. “Oh, dear, dear mamma, be magnificent, we beg of you,” they pleaded, conscious that this was not quite the word they wanted but far too upset to remember magnanimous.

Caroline paused. The thought of being magnificent was page 215 pleasant, but she firmly believed that to be good was not enough. Unless others knew, how were they to profit by your example; and since Linda's crime couldn't be called from the housetops, or all the girls were doomed, where was the satisfaction in being magnificent about it? Yet all these anxious weeping eyes were a better court than none, so Caroline extended to Linda the hand holding the cane.

“You may kiss the rod, my erring child,” she said graciously, feeling like Queen Esther and Cleopatra. Linda, gratefully stooping her flaxen head, did so, and Caroline stood up, feeling her bosom swelling beneath the magenta barége. “Now you may all go about your duties, and I trust you will remember that—whatever happens, and it always may—mamma knows best.”

It was a recognized slogan of the day and scarcely needed reiteration. But the eager chorus of “Yes, mammas” (even from Sophia) helped to fortify Caroline when a little later she came into conflict with Darien. Darien, returning with Lord Calthorpe from Van Diemen's Land—now become Tasmania—could have had no parents to know what was best for her. Assuredly she was hatched from a bird's-egg.