II

At this stage of its existence New Zealand seemed specially made for lovers; with secret scented flax-gullies full of fern and sun and blossoming cabbage-trees so sharply intoxicating to the senses that anything might happen; with blue waters and mangroves along the rivers where a boat might hide among the warm shallows, and stalking, red-legged pukeka-birds would never tell….

Darien reserved boating for the Graham boys and other amorous youths, whose passions interested her so much that she put them in her diary. “Love makes boys so peckuliar,” she wrote, “and I try to discover how peckuliar they can be.” But when Sally said they could never be so peculiar as her spelling Darien went off to the flax-gully to meet Nick Flower. The headiness of the scent there should draw out the peculiarities of gentlemen much more than any boats could do. Besides, Nick Flower had said that he might bring her some satin slippers from Sydney.

“I'll have no money to pay for them,” she had warned him. “Peregrine never gives me or Sally any, the mean fellow. My size in slippers is a small three, and I want a green pair, a blue pair, and a white.”

“You always expect to get what you want, don't you?” And certainly he was now carrying a parcel as he came pushing through the tall flax-blades and black koradisticks and found her sitting demure in her print gown and sunbonnet sprigged with green. She sprang up, glowing.

“You've got my slippers? Oh … give me!”

He held them high. “And what will you give me, Darien?”

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“That's not fair. You never asked for anything.”

“I do now.”

She looked down; pouting, pinching her lip. Flower moved a step, smiling down on her. How many men had she put on that pretty pose for? A ruthless little devil, an unashamed little devil….

“Let me try if they fit. I mightn't care for them,” she said with one of her quick changes.

“Let you run away in them without payment, you mean.”

“Fool! How could I run away in three pairs?”

He laughed outright. “Here you are, then.”

Now she was slipping on the green shining daintiness, pirouetting before him with little cries of delight.

“Ravishing! Don't they make my feet ravishing? I vow they never looked so charming before. Oh … how I like them….”

How small they are, she thought. I can step just like little stitches. She pulled her sprigged gown higher over the slim ankles. I should never have to wear anything but the best. “Oh, my darling feet,” she cried rapturously.

The man was finding the entertainment quite as good as he had expected. Darien's power of self-absorption was so colossal, her joy in her pretty soulless self so naïve. He asked: “Are you ready to kiss me now?”

She spun round, the golden specks in her eyes like sparks.

“Don't you dare!”

“Oh, I could dare quite easily. The only question is whether I want to.” This brought her to earth, bewildered as a child.

“Don't you want to?”

“Not enough, I think. You're too greedy, my dear.”

“Oh! No gentleman would speak like that.”

“Quite right, Darien. I'm not a gentleman. Nor, I think, are you a lady.”

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“Take your slipper!” She whipped it off and flung it at his head. He put it in his pocket, saying:

“Now the other, please. I know a Maori girl who will give me a hundred kisses for them.”

“You have no conscience,” cried Darien, bursting into furious tears. “I never saw anyone with less conscience in my life.”

He shouted with laughter, flinging his head back on the thick sun-burned neck. How she despised him, hurrying into her heavy leather shoes.

“Let your Maori girls have them. Give all the nasty creatures corns. I don't care.”

“No,” he said, picking up the dropped slippers and rolling the whole package together. “I got them for you. I don't give second-hand things.”

How would she take that? Greed and pride were always playing skittles with Darien. She stood up, a doubtful little smile creeping round her soft lips, playing with the provoking dimple in her pink cheek.

“Now we're quits,” she said, half-ruefully. She put her hand against the rough blue frieze of his jacket-front. “I'll dream of those slippers. I've never had anything so enchanting before. Why are you so kind to me?” murmured Darien, looking up, looking down with her changeful eyes gone blue and innocent as Sally's.

Coquetry, confusion, all a woman's little armoury…. Flower said, smiling:

“Scratch, purr … and then scratch again. You're vastly accomplished, Darien.”

“Oh ! No one will ever love you,” she cried, snatching up her parcel, running up the slope with the bonnet bobbing off her ruddy curls, running to adore herself again in the white slippers and the blue.

Not the right sort of woman, anyway, thought Flower. But who would be the right sort for him, who had no respect for any? Mrs Lovel, he thought, presently tramp- page 47 ing into the little office behind his store, is not a woman. She's a saint….

He sighed. Perhaps the wild scent of blossoming cabbage-trees in the sun had affected him more than he guessed. But there was little time for weakness in him now, moving about the small dusky place, his fair weather-bleached head bringing a kind of light in the darkest corners, his healthy powerful body intent on the matter in hand. Any kind of a punch at Peregrine Lovel was good; but this that was about to be delivered, one of a series which were being delivered well below the belt, was specially grateful. A tall Maori knocked on the door, was admitted and given a chew of black tobacco while Flower swiftly unlocked a cupboard and laid papers on the bare little table.

This message to the great chief Hone Heke: The dealers Flower had met in Sydney would deliver two hundred cases of ammunition and one hundred tuparaguns at Lock's Bay, on the ocean side of Keri Keri, on or about the sixteenth. Heke must send the boats out a full mile, as usual. Pay in Spanish dollars. No paper money. Here were the bills …

Silently the Maori thrust the bills inside his red shirt against the brown skin. His brown eyes with the yellowish whites stared steadily at this Englishman who was selling out his own tribe. A tewara … a devil, the white man, and there were many like him. Christians were all devils, thought Pireta, and now that great Heke had given up being a Christian and was going to fight it was far better.

“Haere, haere … go, go,” said Flower.

“Enoho, enoho ne? … Stay there, won't you?” said Pireta politely.

The door shut. Flower made some notes in his pocketbook and sat thinking in the velvet upholstered chair he had brought from Sydney. Stark crudities and refinements went together in his furnishings as in his nature, page 48 and the sensuousness Darien had roused in him died down as he considered this satisfactory hoisting of Peregrine Lovel with his own petard.

Peregrine would have gone to Auckland long ago if his pride hadn't been so ruffled by the inability of his precious Lynch Law League to catch smugglers, who were making such a jest of the strict laws against supplying ammunition to the Maori. Now the schooner built in the fellow's own yard for Flower was in the trade and money was rolling in. For the Maoris had never worked so hard; growing corn, cutting flax and timber in their rage for tupara-guns—new double-barrelled weapons which especially appealed to a warrior-race keen about their fighting tools.

But the English would be armed with obsolete, single-barrelled, flint-lock muskets when the trouble presently came … Flower shrugged that off. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and Flower meant to make many omelettes. Even a man who has no right to a name for himself or his children can have ambitions.