The hours of respite were not wanting in consolation. The cottage was not locked nor guarded; the prisoners were even able to recover their belongings; the sailors who shared the peril gave the best end of the little room to the two clergy, and joined them heartily in their evening prayers. But the Hauhaus were working themselves up in the Roman Catholic chapel to a devilish frenzy, and the noise of their shouting could be heard long after darkness had fallen. The missionaries passed a sleepless night, sustained only by the evening psalms and by one another's society.
The morning of the second of March brought no relief to their anxiety. Efforts for a ransom failed, and the captives fell back upon their unfailing refuge—the psalms for the day. These were startlingly appropriate to their situation, though hardly calculated to raise their spirits very much. But his companion could not help being struck with the calmness of Volkner's manner, and the beautiful smile upon his face. Like a more illustrious sufferer,
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene.
At one o'clock the two friends prayed together for the last time. The psalms had now become terrible in their urgency:
Eating up my people as if they would eat bread.
Their feet are swift to shed blood.
Swift indeed! Before an hour had passed, a number of armed men appeared and summoned Volkner to go with them. "Let me go too," said his companion; but he was forced back with the ominous words, "Your turn will come next." The young German was marched to a spot near his church, and stripped of his coat. A willow-tree was near at hand, and he was soon stationed beneath it. He asked for his Prayer Book, which had been left in his coat pocket. When it was brought, he knelt some time in prayer. On rising, he shook hands with his murderers, and quietly said, "I am ready." With strange inconsistency his executioners continued shaking hands with him until the moment when he was hoisted up.
An outburst of demoniac savagery followed on the cutting down of the martyr's body. The head was severed from the trunk, and the blood was greedily drunk even by some of the friends of the victim. The Taranaki leader, Kereopa, forced out the eyes and swallowed them. Part of the flesh was taken far inland, where memories of its arrival have been found quite lately by Bishop Averill.
But what of the other prisoner? He was now strictly guarded, and could learn nothing about his friend, except what he gathered from a whisper which he overheard among the sentries: "Hung on the willow tree." Together with the sailors and other Europeans, he was now marched to the spot to which Volkner had first been led. But there was no repetition of the tragedy. There was robbing of pockets, binding of hands, and an exhibition of bullying tyranny; but the lust for blood had abated. With the cryptic utterance, "A time to bind, and a time to loose; a time to kill, and a time to make alive," the bonds were loosed from all the party, and they were bidden to stay for the night in the house of a sick settler named Hooper.
It was a night of horror. In the one small room—18ft. by 12ft.—there were crowded the sick man, four sailors, the missionary, and "six or eight natives—men, women, and children. The suffocation from so many people and from the fumes of tobacco was almost overpowering." Grace had just heard certain news of his friend's fate, and had "every reason to believe that it would be his own last night on earth." Again as he lay awake he could hear "the dancing and shouting going on in the Romish chapel, and also in the church." Again the sailors showed their humanity by sharing their coats and blankets. But there were no evening prayers now, for there was too much moving about. Even his Prayer Book had been carried off: "I could only in private commend myself and my companions to the watchful care of our Heavenly Father. Thus ended this terrible day, upon which the first blood was shed in New Zealand for the Gospel's sake."
The morrow was "a dreadful day of bitter suspense." But it brought its own consolation. The sick man had a few books, and amongst them was a Prayer Book which had been given him by Volkner. Again therefore the psalms could be read, and those for the day "appeared written for the occasion." They had taken a brighter tone: