IV

At Bendemeer a driftwood fire was very gay and scarlet in the big-room chimney, with lights and shadows peering into the arm-chairs covered with cretonned roses where gentlemen sat smoking their pipes in the comfortable manner no other lady's room would allow. They had been singing catches—Toby Bayles and Mr Hutton and young Creston the cadet, and for Tiffany the male voices still lingered in the room that was never particularly feminine for all its cosy cretonnes and hangings. Darien, now at the little piano, pervaded it with that big bright oil-painting of herself above the mantel, her desk with its papers stuck on files, her row of riding-whips on the wall by the outer door, her brass pots stuffed with wool-samples on the top of Tiffany's bookshelves.

No delicacies, thought Tiffany, feeling so involved in the delicacies of this new love troubling her that she could hardly suffer Darien turning from the “Vicar of Bray” to sing like any infatuated lover:

To you no soul shall bear deceit, no stranger utter wrong,
For friends in all the aged you'll meet, and lovers in the young.

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Sewing fiercely at a sheet, Tiffany knew that Brant Hutton was watching her from under his hand, through his pipe-smoke, and felt her cheeks reddening like the cretonne roses, her hands trembling foolishly. Tiffany, what are you doing to open the door again to love? Haven't you learned your lesson yet? Burning face and shaking hands told her that she hadn't, and (for fear they would tell Brant Hutton too) she slipped out of the back-door and down the narrow connecting passage to the kitchen. Darien, building here and there in her casual fashion, had connected the kitchen, added the back-veranda with its stores and dairy, and Tiffany ran through to the veranda as though escaping something chasing her.

But she had brought it with her, to stand in the frosty twilight where buckets and tins on a long shelf twinkled coldly and a three-legged black pot was like a paunchy old gentleman going off on some gay adventure. There must be no more adventures for Tiffany, since adventures (it seemed) were so dangerous for women. Loves were so dangerous. Wild unstable things, these loves that philosophers banished with such slighting contempt. Rootless flying first loves, blown away on the wind of reality, which has no patience with our vapourings. Fair-weather loves that cannot stand a storm. Loves so bright they blind the eyes to what lies below. Passionate loves, burning up the fabric they are made of, wisping to nothingness in the grasping fingers….

Tiffany's love, Dick Sackville's had been compact of all these. And now they were gone, and there was nothing left but the philosophers and this foolish fluttering in her heart, like an untried girl's. She stepped out into the backyard, looking away to the mountains. Above them smoky russet was melting swiftly to ethereal saffrons, softening to turquoise that strengthened into indigo where stars were coming out very fast and bright. A moon, so fragile that her young body took the colour of the russet, was hesitating on the icy peaks, turning gold, slipping down page 403 behind the wall. Frost, conserving each least sound with its jealous enchantment, brought the faint distant song of the river wandering through its scrub-islands and shingle-spits with its thin winter streams, brought an echo from a barking boundary-dog, the blurred murmur of men's voices down at the whare beyond the dim ordered confusion of hack-stables, draught-stables, sheds, stores, work-shops….

In a few years I shall be middle-aged, and if a middle-aged woman hasn't acquired the saving salt of cynicism she is lost, thought Tiffany, struggling to be very cynical with herself. You need a mental emetic, my poor girl, she said, turning to go in, and staying as feet rang on the frosty ground round the corner, and Brant Hutton came catching her cold hands in his strong warm ones, flooding her with such an unexpected rush of words that she stood dumb like any foolish thing until he put his arms about her and kissed her lips. Then she forgot the shirt of Nessus she had worn so long, and clung to him….

One who slept with a less easy mind than Darien might have thought ghosts abroad in Bendemeer that night. Wrapped in a shawl that could not warm her, Tiffany crouched long by the embers of the fire in the big room, listening to the accusings of the arm-chair where Brant had sat.

“You didn't tell him all,” said the chair smugly. I told him about Dick, said Tiffany. “You didn't tell him all,” repeated the chair. I told him I thought it a true marriage and I'd been mistaken; that was enough, said Tiffany. “Was it?” jeered the chair. I never asked him about his early life, pleaded Tiffany. “Women are different,” said the chair.

Well, one knew that, but perhaps Chinese philosophers meant everybody when they wrote about the golden mean. Tiffany reminded the chair of the Buddhist philosopher who, not wishing to deny himself the meat which no Buddhist should eat, decided that a gentleman ought page 404 never to visit the kitchen and see what goes on there. If one don't speak of the wrong, couldn't one pretend it's not there, asked Tiffany, wishing she didn't see Brant sitting with shadowy judgment in the chair.

But the chair (and Brant) made short work of Buddhist philosophers who, they declared, were no better than politicians. It might be wise for some women to hold their tongues, but you can never be happy with a man unless you know he knows the worst of you, they said.

Tiffany huddled down with face hid in her cold hands. Fate had been leading her in paths too dark and lonely to follow, but now she was out of them, now the Plains were a majestic space and a beginning instead of being a blank end. She had no “Please Gods,” as Sally had. Only her own fighting defiant soul. She glanced round the room, so full of Darien, and stood up.

“I will be happy. I shall have my own home and meaning now,” she said, and went to bed, shutting the door on the chair.

In Wellington, Sally had need of many “Please Gods,” finding Mr Lovel's emotion over Nick Flower's death quite inexplicable. For days he was as fretful as a child forbidden to lie on the hearthrug and suck its toes. Some equally infantile image presented itself to everybody seeing Peregrine going about the house in a black scowl; complaining of the food, a draught from the window, insufficient starch in his evening shirt….

“He don't seem to know what he wants,” said puzzled Jerry, smoking with Jermyn in the veranda.

“He knows well enough,” said Jermyn dryly. “But Darien's got it.”

“Darien? Do you mean Flower's money? Why should he expect that? Tainted stuff! I wouldn't handle it,” said Jerry, thinking how it might have been one of Nick Flower's bullets that killed Brian.

It would have been pleasant to tell Jerry that Peregrine had undoubtedly tried to turn a last trick on Nick Flower page 405 and had it turned on himself instead. After wearing no ring for a week, Peregrine had produced one which he called his great-uncle's, but Jermyn knew better. Flower had got the great-uncle's—and so Darien had got a fortune. He said:

“Darien don't mind handling the money.”

Assuredly she didn't. Flourishing her new cheque-book, set gaily on new piracies, Darien was determined to buy Bendemeer. “I offer you a fair price, and besides you Lovels would never make it pay,” she wrote. “With my money—”

Peregrine stood burning the letter between his fingers until the black and the red wisped together and dropped on the carpet. “Oh, Mr Lovel!” cried Sally. Peregrine turned with his black scowl.

“Will you kindly remember my correct cognomen? Jerry, you will go down at once and turn that woman out. I shall not sell Bendemeer. And a woman who accepts money from a notorious evil-liver is no fit manager for property of mine. Jerry, you will turn her out.”

Jermyn said of Sally that she never learned to control anything except herself, though that was more than most of us learn in a lifetime. She controlled herself now and went to write to Tiffany, weeping a little because she could not be at Tiffy's wedding. “Brant says it must be over before the mustering and shearing,” Tiffy had written. “Everything waits on the sheep down here, and nobody would dare to die or be born in shearing time.”

Sally smiled, dabbing her eyes. Dear dear Tiffy who was going to be happy at last, since even Roddy, who had come from Westland to investigate, liked Mr Hutton.

“There is nothing I would not send you if I could, my darling,” Sally wrote in her delicate Italian hand. “But I fear papa is too occupied with business to think of presents just now. I have a pair of unworn stockings that will fit you, and my Honiton lace scarf for your wedding-veil, and I am making you some shifts….”

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Unfolding the scarf that (like all Sally's belongings) smelled freshly of lavender, Tiffany felt that a woman's secret strength must needs be greater than a man's since it has to combine the strengths of submission and commission. “I think mamma has a strong character, Roddy,” she said.

“More than you guess.” Roddy rubbed his chin, watching Tiffy's profile, clear and a little haughty, against the window. “Jermyn has wanted for years that she would run away with him,” he said.

“Roddy! Oh….” Tiffany clutched the filmy billows of scarf as though clutching Sally. “Was there—is there?”

“No. And you know there wouldn't be. I happened to overhear something long ago … and I've watched them ever since. They have loved each other very much, Tiffy, but she'll stick to her last. A brave woman.”

“Oh, yes.” Tiffany sat thinking. A woman's road … with the landmarks so very definite for the body and so obscure for the mind. “I do wonder why all the heads of the world's religions have to be men,” she said.

Roddy (being a man) didn't see how they could be anything else; and Darien came bouncing in, scattering her orders, chasing Roddy out to help Jerry with trestles for the wedding-breakfast table. “Such charming manners, and such hands. I wish he weren't my nephew,” said Darien, looking after him. “Now, Tiffy, come along at once….”

In Darien's hands weddings were ready to behave as spectacularly as all else belonging to her. She had seemed specially spectacular to Jerry nervously advancing Peregrine's proposition about turning her out.

“That stiff black rig,” she cried, standing up before the fire like a man, looking so capriciously feminine with her short red curls and green flowing gown. “Thinks himself God Almighty and the whole New Zealand Parliament, don't he? Well, you tell his lordship that he can buy page 407 Macky's land if he wants any, but if he thinks I'll leave Bendemeer when I'm just getting the wool known he can think again. Doddering old fool,” said Darien, smiling at Jerry so seductively that Jerry's subsequent letter to his father carried no soothing to a gentleman who had just been assisting to vote a price of £5000 on the head of Te Kooti … who would probably bring in the king country now and give us another general war.

For weeks Parliament was as nervous as a lover about Te Kooti. But the king providentially refused to play second fiddle to an upstart such as Te Kooti, who had no Begats. And the Arawa tribe remembered that they had voluntarily made a road through their country so that the Duke might see Rotorua. And numberless chiefs, now receiving salaries from the Government for keeping quiet, while their warriors got flour and other rations, had their own opinion concerning a bird in the hand and thought Te Kooti monstrous foolish not to settle down. But meteors, it seems, do not settle easily; so Te Kooti continued to play havoc, until native allies, scornful of pakeha methods of handling him, pleaded to be allowed to catch the fellow in their own way … which, said Jerry, was the only way it ever would be done.

“I wish,” complained Darien, coming into the wool-shed where Jerry was hanging curtains before each bin for sitting-out places during the dance to follow the wedding, “that we could shut Caroline up in the press while we're dancing. I think you'll have to lame her, Roddy. She takes up such a confounded amount of room.”