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Amongst the Maoris: A Book of Adventure

Chapter I

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Chapter I.

“Allow me to Introduce my Hero, Mr. John Stanley.”

In a lodging-house parlour in London there sat one evening, some twenty years ago, a gentleman of scarcely middle age and a youth of sixteen or seventeen. The gentleman held in his hands a newspaper; but he had not been reading it for some minutes past. After a time he gave up all pretence of reading, and laid the paper down, and covered his face with his hands. The boy, who had been until then occupied with drawing, glanced again and again at his companion, as if unable any longer to take interest in what he was doing, then he rose and walked towards him, and placed his hand upon his shoulder.

“What is it, father?” he asked. “Anything fresh?”

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His father shook his head; then, with an effort, he roused himself to answer.

“No, my boy,” he said; “nothing more than the old miseries: they are quite enough, Jack.” And he smiled sadly, and stroked his son's hand, which rested on his shoulder.

“You must tell me, father. You never will tell me about it.”

“Why should I talk over a very disagreeable subject, Jack? You will know all about it soon enough; but for the present I would rather leave you as free from care as you can be. You are very young.”

“Oh, come, father!” said Master Jack, “you forget that I am more than sixteen years old, and I am nearly as tall as you, dear old Pater. I think you might tell me.”

“Some day I will, my dear,” his father answered. “Boys cannot understand money matters, and it is as well they should not. Money is a great misery—or the want of it, rather, Jack. Don't ask me any more now. Go back to your drawing. I want you to cultivate drawing, Jack. You will find it useful some day.”

Jack went back to his drawing without further questions, and appeared to be busy for a time. In another half-hour his father rose and took his hat, and left the room and the house. Then Jack shoved away his drawing, and set himself to think.

Things had not been always with his father and himself as they were now. This shabby lodging-house parlour, page 3 these dull monotonous days, these brooding-fits on the part of Mr. Stanley—Jack could remember a time very distinctly when he and his father lived in a pretty place in the country.

As the boy sat with his head in his hands, his mind travelled back to those old days.

Jack had been, even in his own estimation, a little fellow then; but he could recollect all that past life. It went by him like a succession of pictures in his mind: the lawn upon which the dining-room opened, the lovely flower-garden—he could see that in his memory even as he thought of it—the large shady trees: he seemed to hear the cawing of the rooks, and to smell the sweetest of perfumes, the scent of the larches. Then there were dogs, he recollected, and horses: he had had a pony of his own in those days. Since those days, thought he rather bitterly, he had had to trudge on foot. How gay the house used to be! Always friends coming and going, always gaiety, always laughter. What a fuss his father's acquaintances had been used to make about him, Jack, when he went down after dinner to dessert! Such pleasant people those seemed to be, looking back upon it. Now they had no friends; no one ever came to see them in this London lodging. Jack could hardly remember any one calling upon them for months past, with the exception of a Mr. Denby, a lawyer.

Then all at once something had happened—something which had changed everything in their pleasant life. Jack page 4 could recall to mind the whisperings amongst the servants, the words he had heard which were not intended for his ears, the sudden cessation of all the merriment and the dinner parties and the visiting; and how his father, from a careless happy man, had become silent and quiet and sad, as he was now.

Then there was great excitement, and great amusement too, to the child, who did not understand why he was pleased, and who wondered that his nurse was found so many times crying when by herself, and why the servants, one after the other, kissed him, and said “good bye” to him, and went away.

He could remember how they all spoke of his father as “poor dear master,” and said “it was a shame, that it was;” but it had been a great amusement to him to escape from the nursery, and look at the crowds of people in the house and about the grounds, and to see all the furniture and the books and pictures brought out and carried away. He knew now what he had not understood at that time, that everything in the place had been sold by auction, and that The Beeches itself had been brought to the hammer.

Then, in a little while after, his father and he left their home and came to London.

Of course, at the time the little boy had been full of questions as to the reason of all these things; but he had been hused down, and told he must not distress his poor papa, and somehow from that day Jack had learnt to look upon his father as upon a man who was to be pitied.

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Yet why had the Beeches been sold? Jack had again and again asked the question.

Shortly after coming to London, Mr. Stanley, his father, had found employment in an office. He, who had done nothing but play and enjoy himself in his youth, and had been used to every indulgence and luxury, had to submit to the drudgery of a clerk's life. It was the most galling of all occupations to a man who had lived as Mr. Stanley had lived, and Jack wondered how his father could submit to it; but when he asked the question, “Papa, why do you go to that horrid office? Why are things so changed from what they used to be? Why did we ever leave The Beeches?” Mr. Stanley would look pained, and try to turn the subject.

But one day, when Jack pressed him for an answer, Mr. Stanley said,

“My dear boy, it is very painful to me to talk of those days at The Beeches, and it is, as you say, very irksome, after all the past, to have to work at what you call ‘that horrid office.’ But it must be done, Jack. It was my duty to leave The Beeches, and it is my duty now to work at whatever I can do in order that we may both live. Do not ask me any more questions about it. You will know all, I dare say, some day. If it would make you happier, Jack, I would tell you now; but it would not do so, and your happiness is the one thing left me to live for now.”

And Jack threw his arms round his father's neck, and hugged him tightly, and resolved in his own mind that he page 6 would ask no more questions. And he had left off questioning until the day on which this story opens, when he began to think that he was growing old enough to be taken into confidence.

Jack had been sent to a school in the neighbourhood during the day, coming home at night, and sleeping at the lodgings. He had become used to the discomfort of the dingy rooms, and had ceased to miss the luxuries of their former life, which at first had seemed indispensable. Such mere outward things we soon get used to, if we have any sense; but Jack loved his father dearly, and he could never become used to seeing him look unhappy and full of care.

He did not remember his mother. She must have died very early in his life, for she was not mixed up with any of his memories of home. His father had occasionally mentioned her name in former days; of late he had not spoken of her. She had been included in the painful past which was not spoken of. He had always been an only child, and Jack's father had been everything in the world to him.

In those old days gone by, when Jack used to scamper about the country on his pony, and everything was delightful and pleasant, his father and he used to talk about his future, and the boy earned all sorts of nicknames because of his wish to go to sea, and it was an understood thing that Jack was to be a sailor; but since things had been so altered, Mr. Stanley never spoke of Jack's going to page 7 sea. The second-rate day school to which the boy had been sent, he knew could be no preparation for the naval service: it was very different to the education he had looked forward to.

Jack Stanley possessed that noblest of qualities—un selfishness; noblest, because it is nearest to the godlike character. His love for his father made him see the impossibility of sending himself to a naval training school. He could guess that the disappointment was as great to Mr. Stanley as it was to him, and he allowed the time to pass over when he might have qualified himself for the navy, trying to be content and to be cheerful in going to the second-rate school.

You may be sure Jack's father knew the struggle which was in the mind of his boy, and he loved and honoured him for it.

So the time for going to sea had passed over, and Jack sometimes vaguely wondered if he was destined in after life to sit upon a three-legged stool in an office, and he would get quite hot at the mere thought, and say to him-self,

“I wonder if I could endure it? I don't believe I could. I would sooner enlist as a private soldier, or go to sea before the mast.”

Fortunately all boys are not constituted alike, for some must go into offices, as others must go to sea or into the army.

The night upon which my story opens was a very foggy page 8 one, some time in November. Perhaps had I said my story opens on an afternoon in November, and the scene is laid in London, I might have omitted writing the fact that it was foggy. But then, you see, some people are so obtuse: they don't take in an idea unless it is put down in black and white; but that does not, of course, apply to you and me, but to the rest of the world, who are dull people. This evening was a depressing evening, had there been no depressing causes besides. Jack Stanley had felt tired when first he returned from school in the afternoon, and his sad thoughts consequent upon his father's words had not seemed to refresh him.

Now, after thinking of the past, he got to dreaming of the future, and gradually his head fell forward upon the table against which he sat, and he dropped off asleep.

Jack Stanley's later life had been a peculiarly lonely one. The school to which he went daily was, as I think I have already made you understand, from the fact that his father could not afford to send him to a more expensive one, the reverse of exclusive; indeed, the proportion of gentlemen in the school was a very small one.

Perhaps from an over-sensitiveness and fear that his son, through his own reverse of fortune, should sink in the social scale, Mr. Stanley had warned Jack repeatedly against making intimacies with boys beneath him in birth and position. There had been no need of any such warning: without the restriction, Jack held himself aloof from almost all his schoolfellows. He was too proud to page 9 be imtimate with those beneath him, and too proud to seek the friendship of boys in better circumstances than himself, as he could not invite any of his acquaintances to the lodgings where his father lived; so that his going to school after a time was for the sole purpose of doing his lessons. It was a very dull life for a boy, and a life calculated to do him a great deal of harm had it continued for any length of time, especially at the age at which Jack Stanley had now arrived; but it was induced simply by the peculiar circumstances in which he was placed. Jack was a handsome boy, tall for his age, with dark eyes and hair, and good features, and a remarkably cheerful expression of face. Here he was, at the age of between sixteen and seventeen, literally without a friend, with the exception of his father; for Mr. Stanley, with the same proud sensitiveness which influenced his son, forbore from making any acquaintances, but went on with his daily work with the apparent indifference of a machine.

I do not say he was right. Men are not made to be indifferent as machines; but I think, considering all things, that his feeling was natural.

From this uncomfortable, uneasy sleep upon the table, Jack Stanley was aroused by a loud knocking at the hall door, and raising his head to listen, he became aware of a sound of voices talking in the passage below. With the thoughts which had been thronging into his mind still fresh in his memory, and the sudden disturbance from his uncomfortable sleep, the feeling that something unusual page 10 had taken place seemed to come as a natural sequence, and there was no sentiment of surprise in Jack Stanley's mind. There are times when we are incapable of being shocked by any event which may befall us.