THE SEARCH FOR ‘THE LITTLE MAIDEN.’
On the following morning I parted with Kahikatea, who was going back
to his hut among the mountains, and thence to the nearest civilised
part to procure such things as he required for his exploration. Tiki
and I continued our way south towards the cottage on the bank of the
stream where his band had left the child in Grey’s care fifteen years
before; not that we expected to find Crystal Grey still there, but for
all that it was the right point at which to begin our search. I may
say here that I no longer had any doubts as to whether the child left
there by the Maoris was Miriam Grey’s daughter, and, as we journeyed
along towards the gap between two lines of snow mountains, I talked
with Tiki about her.
“What clothes had she on when you took her south?” I asked.
“A _kaitaka_ of kiwi feathers,” he replied, with a readiness that
assured me he could recall it perfectly. “She also had _huia_ feathers
in her hair, sandals on her feet, and a small _heitiki_[19] hung
round her neck.”
I pictured the little mite as a kind of “pakeha Maori” chieftainess
travelling south in the arms of a band of cannibals, but as safe as,
perhaps even safer than, a well-guarded child in a Christian family,
for was she not under the word of protection of the _ariki_ Te
Makawawa? Under such conditions she might have journeyed through the
Uriwera, entering it in childhood and emerging at womanhood, without
so much as a hair of her head being harmed.
“What was she like to look at?” I asked again.
Tiki made an expressive gesture of admiration with his hands.
“_He Pakeha!_ She was like a rising star. The young wild swan was not
more beautiful. When it was my turn to carry the little maiden I had
strange feelings, and when she looked at me with her dark eyes a
_waiariki_[20] sprang up in my heart--ah! she had the eyes of a
witch, _pakeha_, but her words were like the sweet hymns of our
ancestress Paré. My heart flies out of my breast, like a bird into
the south, to search for the little white maiden beyond the snowy
peaks there in the distance.”
“But she is not a little maiden now,” I said. “If she is alive she is
grown up--almost a woman. And quite possibly she may have left this
land to cross the Ocean of Kiwa.”
“Ah! wherever she is she will be like the graceful nikau palm among
the trees of the valley, and her laugh will be like running water. I
remember her laugh, _pakeha_! and her lips! they were as red as the
_titoki_ berry in its sheath, but they will be blue with the tatoo
now, if she is almost a woman!”
“I should hope not,” I said, laughing. “They will still be as red as
the cherry, or as the _titoki_ berry in its sheath, if you like that
better.”
“But her black hair will fall upon her shoulders, and she will wear a
_kaitaka_ like our maidens,” he persisted.
I did not wish to damp his ardour in the search for ‘the little
maiden,’ so I said, “Perhaps--we shall see!”
Day after day, as we journeyed on, we talked of the object of our
quest, and I saw from the Maori’s words that he worshipped the memory
of this little maiden as that of a divine thing. What had he seen in
her eyes to produce this lasting impression upon him? I conjured
before my mind the fresh, fair young face of a girl of seventeen or
eighteen, with laughing lips and coal-black eyes, harbouring, perhaps,
a look of the sorceress in them--a look made more emphatic by
enshrouding masses of raven hair. This face glanced down at me between
the fleecy clouds of the far south, but I recall the vision now only
to dismiss it, for it possessed not the dawnlike flush of radiant
beauty that heaven had cast on Crystal Grey.
On the evening of the fourth day we came to the river along the right
bank of which Tiki remembered taking the child. He led the way and I
followed, marvelling at his memory of cliffs and dark pools, and
outstanding trees which he had not seen for fifteen years.
Twilight fell over the bush and the roaring river. I suggested camping
and continuing the journey next morning. But Tiki said we were now not
far from the hut, so we held on for another half mile. Tiki was right,
as he always was in matters of locality, for there, between some trees
a little withdrawn from the bank, we saw a small cottage; but no smoke
came from the chimney, nor was there a light in the window.
“Is it the place?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, looking about him; “it is the place. There is the
_totara_ beneath which we waited while our chief carried the little
maiden up to the hut.”
As we advanced towards the cottage we soon saw that it was deserted.
The little bridge that spanned a stream was lying with one end in the
water, the gate opening on the garden path was leaning sideways from
one hinge; and, as we passed on up to the door, the overgrown path,
the wilderness of tangles in the garden, and, finally, the broken
windows of the hut itself showed that it had long since been deserted.
Opening the door on its creaking hinges, we went inside. The place was
quite bare, except for a bed of fern in one corner, where some
traveller had camped. There was no evidence of its having been
regularly occupied for, I thought, at least ten years. However, I
resolved to sleep there that night, and in the morning push on to the
nearest sheep run, accommodation house, or digging township, as the
case might be, and make inquiries. Accordingly we swept the floor,
brought in more fern, boiled our billy on the hearth, and slept in
more comfortable quarters than those to which we were accustomed.
A strange thing happened in the night--a thing which was the first in
an extended series of inexplicable occurrences, in the progress of
which I almost began to imagine I was being haunted. I awoke suddenly,
and saw the bright moonlight flooding in through one of the empty
casements, and there, looking in, was what I accepted as a mean trick
of my imagination. It was a face--the most vile and wizard-looking
face I have ever seen. The features were those of a negro, wizened,
withered, evil-looking to a degree. I started up into a sitting
posture, and rubbed my eyes, but when I stared at the open square of
moonlight again the face was gone. I sprang to my feet, went over to
the casement and looked out, but saw nothing. Yet what I heard chilled
my blood. From very far away in the bush came a wild, hideous laugh,
like that of a triumphant devil. Bah! was the place haunted, or was I
ridden by some nightmare which had grown out of my fearful experiences
in the mountain cavern? I could make nothing of it, so I went back to
bed, and when I awoke in the morning I laughed it away as a grotesque
nightmare.
When day came I had a good look round the place to see if I could find
anything that would give me some sort of clue to the whereabouts of
Grey, but nothing that I saw afforded me anything to the purpose.
There was an overgrown and almost obliterated bullock-dray road,
however, which I knew must lead to some run or settlement, and this I
proposed to follow, as it led away to the south-west, and would in all
probability bring us to the West Coast Goldfields, or, at all events,
to the sea; so that, at least, we could find our way to Hokitika.
A last look round the interior of the hut before setting out afforded
a peculiar piece of evidence to the effect that some child, six or
seven years old, had left that hut in, or shortly after, the year
18--. I arrived at this conclusion in the following way. While I was
making a careful survey of ceiling, floor, and walls, my eye fell upon
some horizontal scratches on the bare wall near the fireplace. At
first glance they appeared like markings made by a carpenter, but a
closer scrutiny showed me in a flash what they really
were--measurements of the growth of some child. There were eight or
nine. The first, dated June, 18--, was about three feet six inches
from the floor. The next stood an inch above, and so they ran up, some
with dates and others without, to the height of four feet and a little
over. There at a certain date the measurements stopped, from which I
concluded that the child, whose growth had been registered in this
way, may have left at that time. There were no markings anywhere else
to give the idea that any other children had lived in the hut, so the
only conclusion I could draw was that these referred to the child who
had been left there with Grey some fifteen years since.
But a sudden thought arrested my mind. I was getting along a little
too hastily. There might be another explanation of the sudden
termination of this systematic scale of measurements at the height of
four feet something. That last measurement might have had a black edge
to it, in which case it occurred to me with a shade of sadness that
its date might be found again burnt into some little wooden slab at
the head of a grave four feet something in length, in a sheltered spot
in the garden about the hut.
To exhaust this alternative I explained my discovery to Tiki, and
together we went out and made a thorough search all over the tangled
wilderness of a garden, but, to my great relief, found no such grave
or wooden slab. It was more probable, I thought, judging from the
deserted state of the place, and the growth of the quick-hedges since
they had last been cut, that Grey and the child had left the hut
somewhere about the year specified in the last measurement, nine years
before the time of which I am writing.
“The little maiden is not dead,” said Tiki anxiously, when we had
concluded our search; “no, she is not dead. We should have counted
another star in the sky, if the little maiden had passed over Wai Ora
Tane.”
“She is not buried here at all events,” I replied with dry logic,
which I fear compared but poorly with the poetical thought of the
Maori. Then we found the bullock-dray road and set out on our tramp.
Overgrown, bestrewn with _débris_ from the thick bush, and in parts
almost impassable, it led straight down into the south-west, and when
we had followed it for two or three miles it opened out into another
dray road which was in good repair. Here we found fresh bullock
tracks, with the ruts of dray wheels, and after travelling some five
miles in our right direction with the rising sun behind us, we heard a
sound of ‘language’ ahead. It was the bullock-puncher talking in his
most persuasive tone to his long-suffering team.
Presently, turning a slight bend in the road, we came up with him--a
raw Irishman of the lankiest, boniest type imaginable, with fiery hair
and a nose that had been blunted in Heke’s war in the ’forties. His
trousers were not what they used to be; his boots were eighteen by
four; his shirt should have been at the binder’s in several places,
except where it was fashionably fastened at the collar with a tie of
undressed flax clean that day from Nature’s laundry; his socks, which
one looked for in vain between the bottoms of his trousers and the
tops of his boots, were at the wash; and his clay pipe, stuck like a
dagger in his belt of raw bullock’s hide, looked as if it wanted
renewing; but--his language was divine, I mean profane, and his whip,
as it curled in air and dusted last year’s hair from the leader’s
flank, was eloquent with the sublimity of perfect punctuation.
I was drawing out this bullock-puncher, when the off leader stopped,
and, turning his lowered head to the right, gave a violent snort that
scattered the dust and dry leaves from the ground. In a trice the
great whip was unfolding itself in the air, and, as it came down on
the startled bullock’s flank, the well of Irish much defiled
overflowed its banks; but, in the confusion, I heard distinctly from
far away the same wild, mocking laugh of my nightmare. Again I asked
myself if I was haunted, and if so what earthly or unearthly thing had
scared the bullock at that moment. Again I could make nothing of it,
and dismissed the matter from my mind.
We walked by the side of this son of Erin for a mile, and I learned in
the course of conversation that there was a small digging township ten
miles further on. Seeing that he could not talk to his bullocks
properly with anyone else constantly interrupting the thread of his
argument, and that he neither knew anything about Grey nor could tell
me who had last lived in the hut on the river bank, we soon left him
behind, coming along slowly to the tune of “Woo comother
byke--Skipper! byke--Skipper!! ye (crack) byke! Skipper!!!” which tune
had no “grand Amen” in it, but went on and on until, as we drew ahead,
it died away further and further in the distance.
Towards evening we reached the digging township--a quaint, mushroom
growth of tents and rough wooden buildings. Here I began my inquiries,
but no one could give me any information. The floating population of
the gold diggings was not an easy field in which to find traces of a
man who had probably left the district ten years before. The Hindu
saying, “A piece of wood and a piece of wood may meet in the ocean,
and having touched, float away again--like this is the meeting of
mortals,” is especially true in a gold-seeking world, where men come
from everywhere, and drift about between California, Bendigo, and New
Zealand. But late that night chance favoured me. I dropped into the
tap-room of an accommodation house a little way out of the township,
and put my inquiries to the landlord. He shook his head, then turning
to the ten or twelve occupants of the room who were playing euchre at
a large table, he addressed them collectively.
“Say, do any of you chaps know anything of a man named Grey, who lived
in these parts about ten years ago?”
The diggers paused in their play and looked up. One honest-looking
ruffian--a Scot, with sandy whiskers and quick grey eyes, paused with
his arm upraised in the excited attitude a man assumes when he is
about to plank down the right bower. I saw his eyes pass over me in a
quick scrutiny; then, when the others had answered the landlord’s
question with negatives of various kinds, he spun the winning card on
to the table instead of banging it down with a noisy thud in the usual
way among diggers, and, pushing his chair back, asked another man to
take his place, and sauntered out of the room.
I did not think this had any bearing on the matter in hand until
afterwards, when, on leaving the place and proceeding along the road
that led back to the township, I was surprised to see this rough Scot
step out of the shadows by the roadside and come towards me.
“I heard ye askin’ for Grey up yonder,” he said, “and I thocht maybe
it’s Dreamer Grey ye want.”
“Dreamer Grey?” I repeated, laying stress upon the strange Christian
name as I rolled it over in my mind. “I don’t know him by that
name--in fact, all I know about him is that he disappeared from
Hokitika seventeen years ago, and lived for some time in a small hut
on the bank of the river about twenty-five miles down. He was a tall,
soldierly man, with curly black hair, brown eyes, and a short
moustache----”
“Ay, that’s Dreamer Grey,” he interrupted; “but tell me noo, what are
ye wantin’ him for?”
“Are you mistaking me for a detective on his track?” I asked laughing.
“I’m no so sure,” he said gravely as his keen grey eyes met mine in
the starlight. “I’m no so sure, and until I weel ken what ye’re
wantin’ him for I canna tell ye.”
“All right,” I replied. “Grey’s wife has been left a large estate at
home and a lot of money, and I’m searching for her--if living--or,
failing that, for evidence of her death.”
“Grey’s wife? eh, man, but Grey had nae wife. It canna be the same
man?”
“Oh, yes it is,” I persisted. “He had a little girl named Crystal with
him, had he not?”
“Ay, he had then, a bonny wee lassie.”
“With black hair and black eyes.”
“Ay, I mind the wee lassie weel. Ah! man, but she was bonnie.” His
rough voice softened as he said the words.
“That little girl was his own child,” I went on.
“Eh! What’s that? what’s that? his ain child? Weel noo; he telt me
that the bairn was left at his hut one night when he was asleep by the
fire. Hoo d’ye ken it was his ain bairn? Dreamer Grey wasna the man to
tell his mate a dam lee, an’ I’m no the man to stand by and----”
He was getting excited, and I hastened to explain.
“Now, you listen,” I said, “and I’ll tell you how I know what I know;
and, at the same time, you’ll see that what Grey told you was
perfectly true. I have gleaned from the Maoris that they took Grey and
his wife prisoners when they had only been married a few weeks. They
kept the woman, but set Grey free, having first inoculated him with
some strange poison which clouded his mind, and, as they gave me to
understand, entirely dislocated his memory. In due time the little
girl, his daughter, was born, and when she was two years old one of
the chiefs, not wishing to kill her, but wanting to be rid of her,
sent her with a party of Maoris southwards, with orders that she
should be left with the first pakeha they encountered. They came
across the hut where Grey was living and left her there while he was
asleep. Of course, he adopted the child not knowing it was his own.”
“Ay, ay,” said the Scot slowly. “Man, that’s a strange tale ye’re
tellin’ me. But I mind weel that Dreamer Grey telt me he had forgotten
his past life, and he was sae mysterious aboot it that I thocht he had
done something that he didna wish to mind, and that’s why I heid ma
tongue when I heard ye speerin’ aboot him up yonder at the hoose.”
“Ah!” I said. “And how did he come by his strange name?”
“I’m comin’ to that. He said that when the wee lassie was left wi’ him
she telt him her name was ‘Crystal Grey’ as near as a bairn could say
it; and so he ca’d himsel’ Grey, an’ we ca’d him Dreamer, because
every now and again he would stop in his work and look straight ahead
in an oncanny way, as if he was tryin’ to reca’ somethin’ he had
dreamt. Ay, he was a queer body, and what ye say aboot his mem’ry
explains many and many a thing that I couldna mak’ oot.”
“Well now,” I said, anxious to come to the point, “the Maori tohunga
who doctored him with the poison knows where Grey’s wife is and will
reveal her hiding-place to me on one condition--that I find and bring
back the child. Whether his conscience is troubling him, or whether
some strange superstition is at the bottom of it, I cannot say; but I
have reason to trust him, and, if I return with the child, I have no
doubt I shall find her mother. So if you know where Grey and the child
are and have quite given up the idea that I’m on Grey’s track for
something he doesn’t want to remember, perhaps you can give me some
information.”
At this the honest Scot opened his heart, and told me how he and
Dreamer Grey had worked together on the goldfields; how, some ten
years before, Grey had made his pile, and had bought a large tract of
land at the head of one of the sounds on the south-west coast, where
he settled down with one aim in life, to care for the well-being of
the wee bit lassie; and, finally, how, if I were to go there and say
that old Jim Crichton directed me, I should be welcomed with open
arms.
“And noo ma bonnie lad,” he concluded, when he had told me this much
and more, “it’s a dry tale that doesna end in a drink. Come on!”
As he put his arm through mine and drew me away towards the
accommodation house, a stone rolled from the top of a bank twelve or
fifteen feet high on one side of the road.
“Did that fall of its own accord?” I asked myself, and as if in answer
to my question there came again that wild, unearthly laugh from far
away back in the bush.
“Did you hear that?” I asked excitedly, catching my friend by the arm.
“Yes; someone laughing in the bush--sounds oncanny.”
“I heard it once before,” I replied, “but thought it was fancy--some
mad hatter, I suppose.”
And we continued our way to the house.