ALGERNON CHARTERIS. ESO.

New Zealand Graphic, 25 December 1899, Page 9

ALGERNON CHARTERIS. ESO.

By

G.E. GRAY, WELLINGTON.

I I 1F course he was utterly incompetent for the post. He had about > * VI 9 as mucll practical knowledge of Maoris as he had of milking. But an uncle of his was something important in the Colonial Office, and he carried letters of introduction from distinguished persons to vice-royalty, which caused vice-royalty to agitate itself x IT considerably on his behalf. As a result of these agitations, Algernon - | Charteris, Esq., was appointed secretary to a certain Royal commission, established with a view to defining the territorial rights of sundry j West Coast tribes. I “ And a deuce of a mess he’ll make of it,” grumbled old Major Hurston, ■ Sk Chief Commissioner and county magnate of the district. The fellow can’t ■ ' pass time o’ day with a native without referring to a dictionary. Some of his notions about the noble savage-would make a cat laugh. It’s all confounded rot, sir 1 What we want in the service in a young country like this ' are practical, level-headed civilians, not the useless offshoot of an effete aristocracy.” The Major liked that phrase, and repeated it frequently, especially as , his predictions proved true, and Algernon Charteris proceeded to make ” a deuce of a mess of it.” Sfcfc*. His business was to collect evidence amongst outlying villages around Parihaka, where the Commission sat. Now, it is as sensible to hope to entice a child from a tree with a whip in your hand as to accost a native with a pencil and a big notebook. It k was necessary to ascertain the name of each individual, his family, g. his tribe and his ancestral history since his ancestors began; Bk it was not necessary to post up ominous-looking summouses on every other whare when the owner was Hghk merely hiding in the scrub behind. Ridiculous blunders, inaccurate evidence, and riots and b rumours ot riots attended his official peregrinations among the various hapus.

Socially, he was more of a success. The feminine element of the Rangitikei voted his manners charming, his Bond Street “ cut ” beyond reproach. Only Flo Hurston, who shared her father’s contempt for blue-blooded incapables, quite despised him. “ You say it is all new to you,” she remarked, scornfully. “ A child would understand that in this matter, where Maoris are but children, it is useless to affect a magisterial manner with the men, or lift your hat and air your best society polish among a lot oh ignorant old wahines.” Charteris had begun to reconsider the subject of his vocation in life, and question whether a tight remittance wasn’t better than ” acting sheep-dog to a lot of senseless heathen.” Her rebuke fired him with a resolve to succeed in the thing he had undertaken, if it were only to “ round-up ” witnesses from dirty Maori kaingas. Thus determined, he set out doggedly next day on what he was warned might prove a dangerous quest. Te Waia, a tough old Maori of standing, had withdrawn himself with his genealogical tree and a select company of his relations, to a stronghold in the bush, there to evade or resist the Commission, as occasion offered. As he rode, Charteris felt his doubtful humour soothed by the loveliness of the bush scenery. The track led him through long-drawn aisles of sub-tropical splendour, where snowy clematis, white and purple-fringed koromiko, and beautiful pink-tinted convolvulus bells wreathed their greenery above and about him, and dropped their blossoms on the moss-piled carpet at his feet. The tupaki thrust its glossy foliage in his path, and yellowberried karaka, and crimson and orange-coloured kowhai, struggling with each other to meet his eye, were swept gracefully aside by delicate fronds of punga and nikau fern, that traced a lacc-work of emerald arabesques over his head. Above all, the grand old forest giants— rata and kahikatea, totara and rimu—rustled benignly on all the teeming, tangled luxuriance beneath them, murmuring, “ Bloom on, ye forest children, bud, and blossom, and deck yourselves for the eye of man ; ’tis we who behold the mighty expanse of God’s heaven, and hearken to the secret that the winds tell.” Flo Hurston would have been considerably astonished, had she seen this satiated aristocrat rein in his horse, draw a deep breath, and reverently uncover to the Power which could create a grandeur and a glory like the New Zealand bush. Arrived at the clearing, hopeful of an adventure that might prove his mettle, Charteris was disappointed to observe only a solitary Maori girl, with huia feathers in her hair, seated in the shadow of the disused whare. She looked up from her task of weaving dyed flax, and greeted him with a smiling "Tenakoe.” Charteris dismounted, tied his horse, and, mindful of Flo’s hint, leant against the raupo beside the girl. He had not the same temptation to be formal here, for she was a vast improvement on the old Maori crones, whose tobacco-loving habits and general "get-up” filled him with holy horror. “ He ra mahana tenei mo tc pakeha,” “ ’Tis a warm day for the pakeha,” said she. “ Pai ake te inaina kite ra i taha i te ahauhau o roto o te ngahere,” ” He finds the sunshine beside thee more grateful than the cool of the bush,” replied Charteris, without once referring to his dictionary. She and smiled, which encouraged him in a belief that he was getting on. " Will you give me one of your pretty flowers ? ” said he, pointing to a cluster of rata, fastened in the belt of her cotton blouse. She held a crimson blossom up to him. He pinned it into his button-hole, casting amorous glances the while at her pretty, averted face. There was a pause, wherein he bethought him of his mission, and worked out a new sentence. " Surely you who are so young and pretty, do not dwell here alone,” said he at last, artfully ; “ Where are your relations ? ” She shook her head and looked puzzled for a moment, then laughing and nodding comprehension, darted swiftly away, and disappeared in a clump of manuka scrub behind the whare. Charteris complacently lit a cigar. " Good business this trip, old man,” said he, to himself. “ I’ve made an impression there. " She’ll sing my praises, fetch ’em out of their rabbit-holes, and we'll have the old boy and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts down in the family Bible before I’m an hour older.” Pride goes before a fall. His nymph of the woodlands reappeared, driving before her a litter of young pigs, that grunted and snorted, and expressed their contempt for humanity in a series of hideous and discordant squeals ! She noted the dejection and disgust in his face, and burst out laufehing ; he caught the familiar ring in her laugh and stared. Then the pigs scattered to the four winds as he strode amongst them to get at her. ” Flo ! ” he said.

“ 'Twas a joke,” said she, laughing till the tears washed channels of red in her tobaccostained cheeks. "Can't I act the Maori? We knew you'd muddle things with old Te Waia, so Jack and I rode out ahead, talked the crowd over, and he escorted them back to the settlement, while I waited for you.”

Charteris did not mind her joke, although it occurred to him that colonial girls had quite original ideas of humour. But to have it calmly taken for granted that he would “ muddle things ’’ was a little too much. Even an aristocrat has his feelings. “ Thank you,” he said, stiffly, “ Since you and Jack are so capable, and I vice versa, I fancy I d better resign my position in your favour.” She looked at him for a moment, then frankly held out her hand, and that trifling action explained why Flo Hurston, with her blunt manners and boyish ways, was yet the most popular girl in the Rangitikei. “ Forgive me,” she said, “ it was shabby, and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings ; let’s be friends.” Of course that settled it. Charteris granted absolution, and they frolicked for a while like children, gathering ferns, luring the pigs from the manuka with scraps of roasted taro, and slipping and laughing and tumbling ove' the stepping-stones in the creek, whither Flo betook herself to wash the stain off her face. Spring water wouldn’t remove the tobacco juice, and her energetic rubbing, to say nothing of Charteris’ glances, lent such a rich red to the olive hue of her cheeks, that he exclaimed, admiringly :

"By jove, you’re a stunner as a Maori! Stay as you are, Flo, huia feathers and all.” She laughed at the compliment, and replaced the feather in her dark hair. Trifles, we are told, make up the sum of life. Little did they dream that this trifling act was to all but end the reckoning, as far as their two lives were concerned. Meanwhile, Flo’s opinion of her companion underwent an agreeable change, his feelings regarding her became too tender to be recorded, and they both looked back on that happy hour as a delicious bush idyll, pictured in contrast with the misery to follow. For barely had they regained the clearing ere they were surprised and horrified to observe a party of armed Maoris emerge on horseback from the bush opposite, and advance upon them with ferocious yells.

CHAPTER 11. Few natures are given the power to grasp a situation with the miraculous swiftness that Charteris displayed, when he caught Flo’s arm and rushed her towards the whare. ’’ Quick ! ” was all he said, but the girl understood, and no native could have covered more fleetly the thirty odd yards that brought them within its shelter. The Maoris fired on them, and galloped furiously, but at a little distance they drew rein, for the entrance to the whare was one-man width, and the pakeha had a revolver at his belt. Inside the raupo, the two faced each other, Flo white and trembling, Charteris anxious and grim. There had been troublous times of late, in Taranaki, and although this hostility might be mainly directed against himself, he reflected, with a sick feeling at his heart, that the Major’s connection with the Commission had made him very unpopular amongst the natives. “ I can pick six of ’em off,” he said, briefly, in answer to the girl’s mute enquiry, “ but—there are a couple of dozen, and they can burn us out.” “ Oh, no, they daren’t do that,” she cried, eagerly, ” Te Waia is a rangatira, and his whare is tapu against fire.” Charteris had little faith in the religious scruples of these villains, but she was right, for they made no attempt to light the whare, although they could easily have done so. Superstition was the strongest element in the old Maori, and not even for deadly revenge would he break tapu. With trigger cocked, and his teeth set, Charteris eyed the entrance steadily, expecting an attack at every moment. Flo peered cautiously on the gesticulating group, through a tiny hole in the raupo. Presently a Maori raised his rifle, and a bullet hit the wall behind them ; another tore up the earth by their feet. If they riddled the place, it could only be a question of minutes. Should he surrender ? Charteris looked at the girl beside him in irresolute agony. Near this spot, a few years before, two men and a woman were attacked by Maoris. The men were killed in the struggle, the woman was taken alive. . . . He pictured the tragic horror of the scene, and the veins on his forehead grew livid. Suffering produces a quick sympathy between souls. Flo read in his eyes the one alternative he had to offer her, and this girl, whose pretty lips were never hitherto compressed over more than some " final ” in a tennis tournament, lifted a white, unflinching face to his, and nodded. Neither spoke, only Charteris realised that when his five shots were spent, there was a work for the sixth.

Presently Flo, to whom some of the men were known, whispered exciteifly from her loophole. " Tain has finished talking now, and they are —yes, they are going—Oh, Mr. Charteris, they are going away, leaving only Mehaka on guard. What can it mean ? ”

” They are only after our horses,” Charteris said, abruptly, avoiding her face, for he could not bear to watch the hope that illumined and as suddenly died there.

Certain of their prey, the Maoris dispersed in twos and threes about the bush, looking for the pakehas' horses, which were tethered by the creek in the manuka scrub, where Charteris had led them to drink during tne course of Flo’s ablutions. If by any means they could gain them while the Maoris were searching the opposite bush, a dash for liberty might be possible. But it was impossible to slip out of the whare without attracting the attention of Mehaka, who would either fire on them or raise the alarm. Charteris cast a hasty, despairing glance around, and his eye lighted on the hole the bullet had torn in the old raupo wall behind them. It suggested a chance of escape—impossible enough, but their last —and he seized it. ” Take my revolver and stand here,” he said, hurriedly, to his companion. " Shoot—mind, it is necessary—shoot down the first man who shows himself, while I try and hack an outlet in the wall.” She took the weapon without demur. Charteris opened his clasp-knife, and attacked the hole with feverish energy. A few vigorous strokes, and to his inexpressible joy, the weather-worn bulrush yielded. He was on the point of making a further onslaught, when the girl raised her finger warningly. " Hist ! ” she said, softly. " Mehaka is listening "

Charteris had his arm uplifted to strike. It dropped nerveless at his side. Amid a silence which the falling of a pin might have broken, they waited and watched. The Maori bent his head and surveyed the whare at

tentively for the space of a minute. Apparently satis fied that he had been mistaken, he resumed his pipe.

Proceeding cautiously, Charteris soon succeeded in producing a space sufficient for a person to crawl through. He beckoned silently to Flo. With a beating heart, though outwardly calm, she crept over to the wall, handed him the revolver, and allowed herself to be pushed gently through the aperture. What happened next flashed across her vision, and ever afterwards presented itself to her mind’s eye with

the miraculous swiftness of a panorama, or some dumb tragedy, wherein each player acted his part with silent and awful precision. As she emerged into the shadow at the back of the hut, a hand gripped her throat, producing a stupor of breathlessness and horror, in which, as in a nightmare, there figured the phantasms of an ugly, menacing countenance, and an uplifted weapon. These phenomena so captured and fascinated her, that she continued to stare in stupefaction, whilst the grip at her neck relaxed, the play of feature above her changed from menace to rage, from rage to gasping contortion, and the eyeballs proceeded to gape and protrude until only the bloodshot veins were visible, beneath a fury of pressure which Charteris brought to bear upon the man. She saw Charteris take up the short-handled tomahawk he forced the Maori to abandon, watched the gleaming revolutions of it above the man’s head, and involuntarily closed her eyes. Then the blade fell harmlessly to the ground, as lie exclaimed, in disgust, “ Ugh ! I can’t kill the brute ! Your handkerchief and belt, Flo, quick ! ”

Hastily, he made a gag of the articles in question, and, by means of the fellow’s own cartridge-belt, secured him to the stump of a tree. The incidents succeeded each other so swiftly as to appear almost simultaneous. Luckily for the two, it was a solitary reconnoitre which led the Maori to witness their escape. To slip across the manuka, trusting that Mehaka’s vigilance over the entrance would miss them in the rear—that was the next proceeding. It was begun resolutely, and would have ended safely, had not an unforeseen contingency, as is usual, selected this moment to occur. A pig grunted.

Mehaka looked up, saw’ them, and sprang to his feet

with a yell. In an instant the clearing was alive with men. Bullets tlew by the two as they vanished into tile scrub. Half-supporting, half-impelling the girl before him, Charteris reached the creek, released the horses, and stooped to swing Flo into her saddle, w hen a bullet from their nearest pursuer shot the animal dead. The Maori broke through the brushwood panting. Charteris, struggling with their remaining, frightened

animal, could not tire. Woman’s wit saved their lives then. There was no lethargy about Flo now, as she seized her purse from her pocket and flung its contents over the ground. “ See, Mehaka, there is money for you," she said, in swift, insinuating Maori. " Pick up the gold while you can, Mehaka. else they will divide it amongst them, and yours will be but a small share.” Greed of gain, and the desire to capture, struggled for mastery in the man’s face. Greed triumphed With a furtive, backward glance, he flung himself upon the coms. Charteris snatched the girl into his saddle, leapt the creek, and they were off. CHAPTER HI. Houp-la ! What a run that was ! Crossing ranges, skirting gullies, splashing through muddy creeks, bending, double-banked, in the saddle, when Waharoo thundered along a track overgrown with fern or toi-toi, whose lancet-leaves took toll of them in blood as they passed ; twisting and turning to avoid collision with bent branches, dodging scaly punga stems, now crash ing and slipping ami floundering through mazes of creeper and under-scrub, where shreds of Flo's muslin were scattered in their train, and garlands of bush lawyer festooned themselves lovingly around them, where the track was lost in a labyrinth of creeper, and only the old steed’s sagacity and homing instinct brought them through : then a race for it down a stony ti-tree slope, Wallaroo’s fiery hoof-beats kindling a shower of flying flints in their rear, and a glorious gallop across the straight, when the old racer needed neither spur nor rein nor rally-cry to urge him onward, but cocked his ears, sniffed the breeze, and craned his

neck for the river. Meanwhile Charteris glanced anxiously back towards the cover they had left, whence shots and yells and a clatter of hoofs pursued them, and wondered how soon or late they would reach it. It was their only chance, and a poor one, for, byreason of late heavy rains, the river was certain to be Hooded. Unfortunately, in selecting to scour the regular bush route opposite the whare, the Maoris had left them no way of retreat save this. Stay, was it their only chance? As his eyes scanned the mile or so of clearing they had still to cover, it followed a track of clay road which skirted the distant bush, unwinding itself like a length of yellow ribbon among the hills and gullies which stretched away towards Parihaka. At a point in that road where the clearing reached the bush line, something was creeping, amid a cloud of moving dust. It was the mail coach, which, in those days, ran weekly between Wellington and New Plymouth.

" Hooray 1” Charteris shouted, signalling joyously with his cap. " The coach. Flo—don't you see it ? By ail that's lucky, it’s the Wellington mail. Thank God. we're saved ! ” They waved their hats, and shouted and rose irt the saddle, knowing that once within the shelter of that friendly vehicle, with its driver and complement of armed passengers, they were safe. Their signals attracted attention. The column of dust became stationary, and the coach drew to a halt. Charteris, straining every nerve to make pace, gave himself ten minutes to come up with it. At the same moment a hurried colloquy was being held amongst the occupants of the stage. " They’re Maoris, right enough,” a passenger re-

marked, lowering his glass. " The girl’s as brown as

a berry.” Jo, the driver, took the binoculars, and made a careful survey. " Bloomin’ natives, they are, sir. Now, what the thunder ! ”

" See, see ! ” cried one of the two lady passengers, excitedly, " there are more coming down the hill ! Oh. hurry, driver, hurry ! We shall all be killed.” That settled it. Jo whipped up his horses and the dust cloud raised in their progress became a whirlwind so last did their wheels travel. The time was one of danger, and the small party of whites can be forgiven their feeling of relief that three good miles separated them from that increasing horde. It was another matter for the poor fugutives, who gazed after them in amazement and bitterness of heart. Intuitively, Flo knew that her costume was responsible for the hideous mistake, and began to sob weakly.

Charteris could offer no consolation. To overtake the travelling coach from their distance was impossible. They cleared the open and plunged again into the thick forest, that to the extent of half-a-mile belted the river margin. Here the foliage was so dense as to make progress on horseback well nigh impossible. Their clothes were torn, their hands and faces badly lacerated, by contact with jagged bough and prickly creeper. Yet. they pushed on, impelled by fear of those hurrying hoofs behind them, finding consolation in the thought that travelling was as difficult for the hunters as the hunted. A pluckier horse than good old Waharoo never tasted bit, but his ten-mile run, double weighted, was beginning to tell on him at last. His breath came in thick, dry sobs, his flanks were a lather

cf steaming foam and blood. Sick, weary, and sorepressed, they at length left the bush and gained the soft slime and rushes by the river bank. Charteris’ forebodings were too true. The river was no longer a silver stream, winding its way placidly amid virgin forests of flax and fern, but a turbulent raging torrent, whitened from bank to bank in an undulating wall of muddy water, that swept eddying logs, and uptorn shrub and tussock before it, in its helter-skelter race for the sea.

Here at last Flo's courage failed her. The sight ot that hungry, swollen flood did for her what Maori ferocity and ten miles of rough bush riding had not been able to accomplish—it broke her nerve. She screamed and struggled and clutched the reins as Charteris headed their animal for the water, imploring him to turn, and crying and clinging hysterically to his arms. Charteris dared not hesitate now. The persistence of

the Maoris in pursuing them thus far left little doubt'as to their motives. If he yielded to her entreaties they were lost. “ Listen, dear,” he said, disengaging himself gently from her convulsive embrace. " We must ford the river, or the Maoris will kill us. Try not to be afraid. Hold on tight, and leave the rest to me.” Had anyone told Flo Hurston that morning that the despised Englishman would address her in tones so authoritative, she would not have believed it. Circumstances alter cases. It was the new chum—the society fop—who rose in his stirrups and rallied Waharoo into the black water, while she. a New Zealand girl, hung limp and terrified to the saddle. How they got across, Charteris never quite knew.

He was a strong swimmer, and his strength was their salvation that day, for in midstream Waharoo succumbed. He sank under them, and the last they heard of the good old horse was his pitiful neigh as the current caught him. Charteris became colossal then. Not only did the instinct of self-preservation, first and last in man, inspire him to superhuman efforts, but a sweet and subtle consciousness that he was wrestling with destiny for the life of the woman he loved, upheld him, and bequeathed him power, with every buffet of wind, and wave, to fight the harder. Yet, in spite of

all, they must have been drowned, had not fatigue suddenly overcome Flo, rendering her senseless and mobile in his grasp. By a supreme expenditure of strength, he managed to keep her head above the crests of the mud-coloured waves, while he strained sinew and nerve to make the shore, pausing now and then to snatch breath, and struggle desperately against that deadly laxity of limb and will which attacks the drowning. As his strength lessened, the little chocolate-coloured hills, chasing each other amid a noise and splashing like a hundred cascades, became each a separate summit, to ascend and slide down and surmount at last, with a valley of foaming snow-drift and a new summit beyond. Wave after wave rolled upon him in a monotonous

rotation, of which his tired faculties strained in vain to keep count. That the Maoris had abandoned their quarry for lost, he did not know, nor could it matter now. A parting-shot nipped him below the shoulderblade, tearing an ugly flesh-wound, and it seemed to him but the prick of a pin. Loss of blood must have weakened him, for in the last stages it all became dim. They were phantom swimmers, striving in a sea of mist to reach an ever-fading shore. The beating of angry

water in his ears was like the far-away moan of the sea in a shell. Instinct, rather than reason, led him at the last, when, grasping the friendly river-reeds, he hoisted himself and his burden up the bank, staggered a pace or so, and fell heavily to the ground.

“ And you thought him a useless fop. Father, how could you ? ” Flo demanded, reproachfully, for the hundred and ninety-ninth time during the course of her friend's convalescence.

“ My dear girl, what utter nonsense you talk,” the Major said, testily, " I have invariably admired the young man, if only because he belonged to a class capable of furnishing instances of bravery and heroism in their highest form. Noblesse oblige ■' you know, my dear, noblesse oblige!” and the Major blew his nose hard, in order to conceal the pride he felt in that apt quotation. ” How about my heroism ? ” queried Jack Hurston, modestly. News of a native conspiracy having reached him during his homeward journey, he hurried hastib. back, in time to rescue the pair by the river-bank. Charteris ridiculed the compliments showered upon him from every quarter, but the praise that Flo’s eyes

silently uttered was very sweet to him. It was mournful to reflect that all the chivalry of a Lochinvar wouldn’t provide pounds, shillings, and pence sufficient to maintain his pretty, promised wife. He was spared such reflection. Titled relations have these two virtues—they can die. and they can leave money. An antiquated countess obligingly did both, the sole legatee in her last will and testament being “ My grand-nephew, Algernon Charteris, Esq.”