MOUNTAIN PANORAMA

Evening Post, Issue 149, 20 December 1935, Page 14

MOUNTAIN PANORAMA

settled. But Ido believe in self-government.' At paraha. The lament ended suddenly as though the beginning of my service, I was sent to Ireland, the arrow had reached its mark. and since .then—from the misery I saw there—l "Which is the .quickest track back for me" he would give every man a vote and a share o£ land said. —but I move to this slowly, slowly——" ; She flung the child on high as though it were He walked, out of the room, leaving'Eyre'tod- a banner. . - mouthed behind him. A minute later he returned "He forgave you;-his son forgave you; but I with all his anger masked. "We cannot agree curse you. And one day the Maori will do to upon the points at issue, but could I offer you you everywhere what Ido now!" any refreshment?". His face looked old and worn, She slammed the flimsy door in his face, though in its prime. Inwardly he was filled with As he dropped farther down the'heavy slope to an intolerable shame that he should have bared a light that he glimpsed below, his mind was on his: heart, that his armour of reserve should have the hill behind him, and on RauparaKa He had betm pierced by an upward thrust, and that he like Napoleon, more conception of conquest than should have descended to self-justification to a of country, subordinate. ' ° He was crafty, he was cruel, he was rapacious, Eyre, ashamed of his own outburst, departed and yet he had the silent, boding splendour of a mumbling. ? comet. Not Heke's anger, not Kawiti's, not RangiGrey, still shaken, sat down to his mail. The haeata's had had for him the fascination of the paper he pushed aside ir.ntably. He seldom read taut, wary spleen that he suspected in Rauparaha it if he.thought it critical, for he felt that vexation He had defended his action to the Colonial Office might weaken his will and his usefulness. Never in July and sent another dispatch in December It

"My man died. His sista want the child. She said you will take it from me." (Srey remembered a petitioner that he had had a week before, a grey-haired woman, prim but fanatical, wjio had implored him to rescue her brother's child, born in wedlock, from its heathen mother. "I'll take it, dark and all," she said "to save it from the pa," and, behind her show of magnaminity, he had sensed the ancient hunger of mortals for continuity by mind if not by flesh that instinctive quest for immortality transmitted as blindly as a cuckoo's sense for flight. He looked at the woman who stood awaiting his decision as one too proud to treat. "The child is yours and no one can take it. Tell her .that is the word of Kawana Kerei." He looked for her to go, but they stood still, she and the child, as though carven in one. * "I Nam the woman who would not tell you the way and I still hate you for Rauparaha." "It does not matter."