II

Jerry, having married Miss Clara Scott in Christchurch, had had no need of Darien's ministrations there. But since she had refused to turn out of Bendemeer, she consented to build him a cottage nearer the river, where he was very happy planning the great mansion which was to be another Lovel Hall some day. Already he and Clara had decided on the number of rooms and the width of the veranda; and meanwhile she had her baby, and he had his work on Bendemeer … which had expanded amazingly since England's great loan flooded the country with present and prospective wealth.

Fate, having been niggardly with this new land for so long, now tried another game on it. Lifting the cornucopia to her shining shoulder she poured out riches in such bewildering floods that everybody wondered what they had been about to think they had had enough before, and plunged so swiftly into spending and speculation that one almost heard the splash.

Of course we can never have enough, declared the gentlemen, hurrying to buy from the provincial governments, before they were abolished, any amount of land at £2 the acre, with no restrictions other than the childish one that the sale must not be for less than twenty acres. A monstrous useful restriction, that, considered the gentlemen, planning their new blocks with everywhere nineteen-and-a-half acres between, which (since they couldn't be bought) presently became absorbed in the blocks already bought. In Canterbury all the big stations were increasing, and immigrants coming with a few hun- page 432 dred pounds in their pockets were quite squeezed out. The small man is a danger. How can any hand-to-mouth settler establish first-class breeds of sheep and cattle as we can, said the English county gentlemen, conscious of their duty to New Zealand, of new county families already opening eyes and mouths with infant cries.

To Darien this new game of piracy was the best fun yet; and she went to it with such gusto that Bendemeer soon had blocks stretching away to the foothills, where thousands of succulent snowgrass acres were gradually coming under the hoof; and sheep, cattle, and horses roamed where they would until the mustering time. Many station-owners increased their land by mortgage. But Darien paid in bags of gold, and let everyone know it, for the same reason that she had had the covers of her brood-mares fitted with silver chains and “Bendemeer” done on the outer gates in gilt studs.

“I'll wear gold studs in my nose if I like. I can afford it,” said Darien, keeping a watchful eye on fencing-gangs at work in the blazing sun, on the deadly mischief of the nor'westers, the biting southerly busters that brought the snow. “Be careful with those survey-pegs,” she ordered as the low sod walls rose on the level tussock, to be sown later with gorse and protected by shining wires until the gorse grew. Already many fences were high enough for good jumping; so these gentlemen riders of the Plains put their heads together, establishing kennels for drag-hunts, since there were plenty of weka-birds and imported pheasants and quails but no foxes.

Andrew declared that we must import hares. But meanwhile drag-hunts were excellent fun; with men, women, and children all following somehow, and uproarious evenings at Durdans, at Bendemeer and elsewhere, and no end of Witney blankets for a sleepy man to roll himself in on the floor when all was done.

For Janet hunts were a combined ecstasy and anguish, for hidden wire in the fences trapped many and somer- page 433 saults were common. But gentlemen looked so gallant, so well-turned-out on their well-bred horses, and the master in his green coat she would never forget-until there was another one next year. With her slim girlish body of eighteen and a mind as near eight years old as Linda could manage it, Janet would have been a continual danger to young men if she had been less shy.

Sophia was Janet's greatest comfort at these times. Sophia, who had come to cook and be bullied by Darien when Major Henry died, was always interested in the gentlemen, though she said it was their souls, while Janet was so innocently interested in their bodies.

Since these were the spacious days, a good twenty men and several women crowded into Bendemeer one evening when the hunt was done and the red frosty sunset gave place to the great red fires. All the Plains stations kept full larders of chines of beef, hams, legs of mutton, endless bacon, and eggs for hungry men; all sideboards gleamed with bottles, and beer-barrels were continually full. So Darien fed her horde; and the men ranged where they would, and the women sat and talked over the fire with skirts drawn up…. Tiffany and Darien, Jerry's jolly Clara, and Sophia, whose cap and shawl Darien had long since stuffed under the copper. If you can't be good in a tartan gown and those sausage-curls I bought you in Christchurch, you can be wicked, said Darien. I'd rather you were anyway.

But since Sophia couldn't be wicked even in false curls she warmed her toes and thought of her curios while the others talked and laughed. Darien had been so kind in giving her an outhouse for her curios, and there they lay in rows on the shelves—Maori axes and deep-grooved tops that sounded the high whining note for the tangi when you spun them, paper-weights with snow-storms inside, and glass candlesticks an inch long, a kaleidoscope where bits of coloured glass fell into different designs, scraps of kauri gum, shells carved into cameos, Maori mats page 434 and poi-balls…. My collection really is beyond price, thought Sophia, who intended to have it priced some day and give all her ensuing wealth to the Chinese missions.

The men came in, and there was a deal of laughter and joking, and Sophia went to bring great jugs of cocoa topped with cream and huge thick slabs of currant cake while Tiffany lay back among cushions, watching Brant being as intent as anyone else. So intent on all he did, this man she loved. So incredible that her wild self should love Brant with his close instincts of the English county gentlemen, his bringing up of their two boys in English ways … with nurseries, and coming in for dessert, and cricket-balls already in their little hands, and an English public school in prospect by and by. Like Frank Crofts and everyone else, Brant was setting out to raise an English county family on the Plains … and Tiffany laughed and let him, knowing that her own battle ran so much deeper than that.

The Englishman's harem instinct was near as strong in Brant as in papa … or in that Caesar whose wife must be above reproach. And though his innate justice always tempered it with courtesy, that wouldn't help much if ever he knew that she had been what he called a fallen woman. What with the exquisite terror of that knowledge and the expectation that careless Darien might any day let it out, Tiffany felt herself living in glorious insecurity from day to day and was conscious that she had found a proper method of combating dullness. Without that fear she would undoubtedly have fought Brant … who didn't know how lucky he was.

About her the talk jumped from sheep to fishing, to the paradise duck which gave such good shooting, to the tentative crops now appearing on the Plains, and back to the sheep by which they chiefly lived. “I'll show you my purebred Saxon merinos to-morrow,” promised Darien, who had just imported them from Germany. “None of you page 435 have anything to touch 'em. Wake up and sing something, Tiffy. You're not earning your keep.”

Chorus-songs where everyone could shout were best after so much cake and cocoa, and the gentlemen did so well with “John Peel's” tally-hos that Darien clapped her hands. “I do love noise,” she said.

All a little crude and colonial, thought Brant Hutton, but we will better it in time. Tiffany (he felt, watching her so vital and gay at the piano) was already bettered. At times I could almost think her English, he thought, gratefully bestowing the highest praise he had.

For those men who stayed all night there were mattresses and chaff sacks on the big-room floor, while Tiffany slept in the second bed in Sophia's room. But there was not much sleep in it, with Sophia bringing her pale scared eyes close to whisper about Linda's Prue. “I fear she's in love with one of our station-hands. A gentleman,” said Sophia, very impressive.

“Nonsense, dear. She's only seventeen.” Sophy was always fearing something.

“Every girl is in love at seventeen. Over and over. But there are no gentlemen like those splendid officers in these days,” sighed Sophia.

“If you'd said Janet, now….”

“Oh, she's never out of it, though Linda won't let her talk to men, and I do teach her hymns about ‘Brief life is here our portion and men were deceivers ever.’ But Prue never has before, and Bethune is a gentleman though just a tramp Darien picked off the road,” said Sophia, looking so dreadful in a red flannel dressing-gown and all her false curls off that Tiffany shut her eyes.

Quantities of tramping swaggers of all classes since the Westland gold-fields were no longer doing what they should, and every station-owner gave orders to his hut-cook to feed two nightly, though if there were more they had to ask at the house. Bethune, it appeared, had asked at the house, and Darien, liking his manner, had given page 436 him a job at the fencing. “She enjoys bullying gentlemen,” said Sophia, feeling how often Darien mistook her for a gentleman. “And Prue is always riding over with messages from Linda, who never troubles to come herself.”

Linda, as Tiffany knew, rarely troubled to do anything now that her daughters were old enough to do it for her. Even Caroline had been turned over to the girls, who were so dutifully busy from dawn till dark that one would have marvelled they could think of love, except that it seems indigenous in everybody. For most women, thought Tiffany, sons soon become individuals; but daughters often remain merely projections of themselves, specially invented to receive all the knocks. Linda's daughters were those parts of herself which she projected in vicarious sacrifices … and if she could help it they would never be anything else.

“I'm glad you told me, Sophy, dear, and I'll ask Linda if she will let Prue stay with me for a while. Don't speak to anyone about it. It would only make trouble.”

Lying near the open window while Sophia slept with a flannel petticoat of silent protest round her head, Tiffany thought how Prue had always been one of the rebellious Lovels, belonging to this new land as her father and mother did not; for Linda proudly talked of being English-born, neglecting to mention that she had been weaned by a goat on the voyage out. It has given us colonials such a false idea, thought Tiffany. Trying to adapt all the old hidebound beliefs and traditions to our new outlook and surroundings, and making such a muddle of both. We should have started at the beginnings, before man had so overridden nature with art….

But of course we couldn't with so much against us. Those who heard the voice of the new land, which is the sweet wise voice of the Ancient of Days, were helpless against authority. And so in time they ceased to hear; and the methods of what Roddy called English-and-water page 437 went on … sheltered old-world teaching in an unsheltered land….