On the drive stood the Pilot, who held Amiria’s big bay horse as if it were some wild animal that might bite. He had passed round the creature’s neck a piece of tarred rope, which he was making fast to the tethering-post, while he exclaimed, “Whoa, my beauty. Stand still, stand still. Who’s going to hurt you?”
The Maori girl, holding her skirt in one hand, tripped merrily forward and took the rope from the old seaman’s grasp.
“Really, Captain,” she said, laughing, “why didn’t you tie his legs together, and then lash him to the post? There, there, Robin.” She patted the horse’s neck. “You don’t care about eating pilots, or salt fish, do you, Robin?”
“We’ll turn him into the paddock up the hill,” said Rose. “Dinner’s ready, and I’m sure the horse is not more hungry than some of us.”
“None more so than Mr. Scarlett an’ myself,” said Sartoris, “—— we’ve not had a sit-down meal since we were wrecked.”
CHAPTER IV.
Rachel Varnhagen.
He sat on a wool-bale in his “store,” amid bags of sugar, chests of tea, boxes of tobacco, octaves of spirits, coils of fencing-wire, bales of hops, rolls of carpets and floor-cloth, piles of factory-made clothes, and a miscellaneous collection of merchandise.
Old Varnhagen was a general merchant who, with equal complacency, would sell a cask of whisky, or purchase the entire wool-clip of a “run” as big as an English county. Raising his eyes from a keg of nails, he glanced lovingly round upon his abundant stock in trade; rubbed his fat hands together; chuckled; placed one great hand on his capacious stomach to support himself as his laughter vibrated through his ponderous body, and then he said, “’Tear me, ’tear me, it all com’ to this. ’Tear, ’tear, how it make me laff. It jus’ com’ to this: the Maoris have got his cargo. All Mr. Cookenden’s scheming to beat me gifs me the pull over him. ’Tear me, it make me ill with laffing. If I believed in a God, I should say Jehovah haf after all turn his face from the Gentile, and fight for his Chosen People. The cargo is outside the port: a breath of wind, and it is strewn along the shore. Now, that’s what I call an intervention of Providence.”