III

Roddy (said Jermyn) loved an old song's lady, or a phantom, or his own dreaming face mirrored in little clear pools. He cradled infinity in his palms, unaware that he must lose it. He drove John to unnatural curses over his dislike of killing a sheep, and would stop the long heavy line of ploughing bullocks to watch the big bronze wood-pigeons wheel against the sun, or to listen to the blue-feathered scarlet-legged pukeka calling in a warm flax-swamp so resembling the mere where Bedivere threw page 250 Excalibur that Roddy's arm ached to draw Arthur's sword for all that was good and pure. And then Uncle John, sowing seed out of a creel behind him, would roar like an angry lion.

Roddy, companioning with Helen of Kirconnel Lea, Kilmeny (who had seen with the fairies what she couldn't declare, though Roddy was always trying to declare it on his flute), Marmion's injured Constance and other delectable ladies—Roddy was unconscious of the exact period when, as was natural in the bush of which she was an emanation, these dear dead women began taking the form and colour of Eriti Fleete.

Golden-tawny like honey of Hymettus, Eriti; like the young curling bracken-fronds—soft sisters of her little fingers and toes, dusky-lipped as the crimson rata-flower, straight and supple as lance-wood saplings in the wind—Roddy found comparisons for everything except her voice. Bellbirds at dawn, tuis in rapturous chorus were not to be compared with Eriti singing old Maori waiatas of love and sorrow while he lay steeped in that vision which is beyond sight, beyond sound, which shows itself but once to youth's innocent chastity and flies for ever from the groping hands of passionate man.

Eriti, riding long rough miles through bogging swamps and tangling bush until her poor little body was numb with weariness and only the bursting longing of her heart held her up, had always known Roddy for a god—which was why she had been a modest girl and not given him long ago the ropa, the hand-squeeze of invitation. One does not take liberties with gods but meekly awaits their pleasure, felt Eriti, as Roddy lifted her off the horse's bare backbone at the door, he looking so clean, so white and golden that she hastily tried to comb her hair with her fingers, to straighten her cotton frock, before following him in with the mail of papers and letters which were always her excuse for coming.

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Then Roddy made damper, and Sir John poured milkless tea into pannikins—between them they had broken all the china. So youth supped on nectar and ambrosia, and afterwards there was music out under the tree-ferns like fairy tents, the cabbage-trees like Maori warriors in their rustling mats, the stars … old enchantments closing in with the old magic through the great bush-silence, the sharp sweetness unlocked from earth and leaves….

John, dozing over the Times of four months back, with his great boots to the embers, found himself still resentful of Linda's man who had taken his Hereford bull and gone off at once with it in a brig sailing for Wellington. From there he would pick up something else to take him down the coast to Canterbury, but his bride would have to travel by way of Sydney in a boat with cabins, said Andrew, sailing away.

“He won't come back; it was only the bull he wanted,” John told Caroline who, wishing for no inquiries into that matter, crushed him with: “Pray remember that I have still four daughters to marry off and don't hinder with your nasty insinuations, though I have long since given up expecting help.”

Yet she was sufficiently anxious to make Linda write almost daily to Andrew, telling about her trousseau and the presents already coming in and promising to be ready as soon as he could come for her. Though what with these newfangled postage-stamps and letters having to go round by Sydney, twelve hundred miles away, who could tell if he would ever get them, thought Caroline, pestering John each time he came to town for more money for Linda.

Why in the name of common sense do men want to marry? thought John, conscious that he had never lived so peacefully before. He cast his mind back to his wooing of the black-eyed burgeoning Caroline and sighed.

Ah, well, I suppose we just can't help it when the time comes, he thought, picking up the Times again.