At first I thought I must be dreaming, so silent and hopeless stood that weird figure. My next impulse, without staying to consider my dishevelled hair and loose wrapper, was to open the door and beckon the poor man within the shelter of the verandah. When once I had got him there I did not exactly know what to do with my guest, for neither fire nor food could be procured quite so early. He crouched like a stray dog down on the dripping mat outside the door, and murmured some unintelligible words. In this dilemma I hastened to wake up poor F——, who found it difficult to understand why I wanted him to get up at daylight during a "sou'-wester." But I entreated him to go to the hall door, whilst I flew off to get my lazy maids out of their warm beds. With all their faults, they did not need much rousing on that occasion. I suppose I used very forcible words to convey the misery of the object standing outside, for I know that Mary was in floods of tears, and had fastened her gown on over her night-gear, whilst I was still speaking; and the cook had tumbled out of bed, and was kneeling before the kitchen fire with her eyes shut, kindling a blaze, apparently, in her sleep.
As soon as things were in this forward state, I returned to the verandah, and found our swagger guest drawing a very long breath after a good nip of pure whisky which F—— had promptly administered to him. "I'm fair clemmed wi' cold and wet," the swagger said, still bundled up in his comparatively sheltered corner. "I've been out on the hills the whole night, and I am deadbeat. Might I stop here for a bit?" He asked this very doubtfully, for it is quite against swagger etiquette to demand shelter in the morning. For all answer he was taken by the shoulder, and helped up. I never shall forget the poor tramp's deprecating face, as he looked back at me, whilst he was being led through the pretty little dining-room, with its bright carpet, on which his clay-clogged boots and dripping garments left a muddy, as well as a watery track. "All right," I said, with colonial brevity; and so we escorted our strange guest through the house into the kitchen, where the ever-ready kettle and gridiron were busy preparing tea and chops over a blazing fire. Of course the maids screamed when they saw us, and I do not wonder at their doing so, for neither F—— nor I looked very respectable, with huddled on dressing-gowns and towzled hair; whilst our foot-sore, drenched guest subsided into a chair by the door, covered his wretched pinched face with two bony hands, and burst into tears. I certainly never expected to see a swagger cry, and F—— declared the sight was quite as new to him as to me. However, the poor man's tears and helplessness gave fresh energy to my maids' treacherous nerves, and they even suggested dry clothes. Our good-natured cadet, who at this moment appeared on the scene, was only too happy to find some outlet for his superfluous benevolence, and hastened off, to return in a moment or two with an old flannel shirt, dry and whole, in spite of its faded stripes, a pair of moleskin trousers, and a huge pair of canvas cricketing shoes. It was no time for ceremony, so we women retreated for a few minutes into the store-room, whilst F—— and Mr. A—— made the swagger's toilette, getting so interested in their task as even to part his dripping hair out of his eyes. He had no swag, poor fellow, having lost his roll of red blankets in one of the treacherous bog-holes across the range.
That man was exactly like a lost, starving dog. He ate an enormous breakfast, curled himself upon some empty flour-sacks in a dry corner of the kitchen, and slept till dinner time; then another sleep until the supper hour, and so on, the round of he clock. All this time he never spoke, though we were dying to hear how he had come into such a plight. The "sou'-wester" still raged furiously out of doors without a moment's cessation, and we were obliged to have recourse to the tins of meat kept in the store-room for such an emergency. The shepherd told us afterwards he had ventured out to look for some wethers, his own supply being exhausted, but the whole mob had hidden themselves so cleverly that neither man nor dog could discover their place of shelter. On the Monday night, exactly a week after the outbreak of bad weather; the skies showed signs of having exhausted themselves, and nature began to wear a sulky air, as if her temper were but slowly recovering herself. The learned in such matters, however, took a cheerful view of affairs, and declared the worst to be over,—"for this bout,"—as they cautiously added.
Whether it was the three days of rest, warmth, and good food which unlocked the swagger's heart, or not, I do not pretend to decide; but that evening, over a pipe in the kitchen, he confided to Mr. A——that he had been working his way down to the sea-coast from a station where he had been employed, very far back in the hill ranges. The "sou'-wester" had overtaken him about twenty miles from us, but only five from another station, where he had applied towards the evening for shelter, being even then drenched with rain, and worn out by struggling through such a tremendous storm. There, for some reason which I confess did not seem very clear, he had been refused the unvarying hospitality extended in New Zealand to all travellers, rich or poor, squatter or swagger, and had been directed to take a short cut across the hills to our station, which he was assured could easily be reached in an hour or two more. The track, a difficult one enough to strike in summer weather, became, indeed, impossible to discover amid rushing torrents and driving wind and rain; besides which, as the poor fellow repeated more than once during his story, "I was fair done up when I set out, for I'd been travelling all day." Mr. A—— told us what the man had been saying, before we all went to bed, adding, "He seems an odd, surly kind of creature, for although he declares he is going away the first thing to-morrow, if the rain be over, I noticed he never said a word approaching to thanks."
The rain was indeed over next morning, and a flood of brilliant sunshine awoke me "bright and early," as the country people say. It seemed impossible to stop in bed, so I jumped up, thrust my feet into slippers, and my arms into a warm dressing-gown, and sallied forth, opening window after window, so as to let the sunshine into rooms which not even a week's steady down-pour could render damp. What a morning it was, and for mid-winter too! No haze, or fog, or vapour on all the green hills, whose well-washed sides were glistening in a bright glow of sunlight. For the first time, too, since the bad weather had set in, was to be heard the incessant bleat which is music to the ears of a New Zealand sheep-farmer. White, moving, calling patches on the hillsides told that the sheep were returning to their favourite pastures, and a mob of horses could be descried quietly feeding on the sunny flat.
But I had no eyes for beauties of mountain or sky. I could do nothing but gaze on the strange figure of the silent swagger, who knelt yes, positively knelt, on the still wet and shining shingle which formed an apology for a gravel path up to the back-door of the little wooden homestead. His appearance was very different to what it had been three days before. Now his clothes were dry and clean and mended,—my Irish maids doing; bless their warm hearts! He had cobbled up his boots himself, and his felt hat, which had quite recovered from its drenching, lay at his side. The perfect rest and warmth and good food had filled up his hollow cheeks, but still his countenance was a curious one; and never, until my dying day, can I forget the rapture of entreaty on that man's upturned face. It brings the tears into my own eyes now to recollect its beseeching expression. I do not think I ever saw prayer before or since. He did not perceive me, for I had hidden behind a sheltering curtain, to listen to his strange, earnest petitions; so he could not know that anybody in the house was stirring, for he knelt at the back, and all my fussings had taken place in the front, and he could not, therefore, have been doing anything for effect.
There, exactly where he had crouched a wretched, way-worn tramp in pouring rain, he knelt now with the flood of sunshine streaming down on his uplifted face, whilst he prayed for the welfare and happiness, individually and collectively, of every living creature within the house. Then he stood up and lifted his hat from the ground; but before he replaced it on his head, he turned, with a gesture which would have made the fortune of any orator,—a gesture of mingled love and farewell, and solemnly blessed the roof-tree which had sheltered him in his hour of need. I could not help being struck by the extraordinarily good language in which he expressed his fervent desires, and his whole bearing seemed quite different to that of the silent, half-starved man we had kept in the kitchen these last three days. I watched him turn and go, noiselessly closing the garden gate after him, and—shall I confess it?—my heart has always felt light whenever I think of that swagger's blessing. When we all met at breakfast I had to take his part, and tell of the scene I had witnessed; for everybody was inclined to blame him for having stolen away, scarcely without saying good-bye, or expressing a word of thanks for the kindness he had received. But I knew better.
From the sublime to the ridiculous we all know the step is but short, especially in the human mind; and to my tender mood succeeds the recollection of an absurd panic we once suffered from, about swaggers. Exaggerated stories had reached us, brought by timid fat men on horseback, with bulky pocket-books, who came to buy our wethers for the Hokitika market, of "sticking up" having broken out on the west land. I fear my expressions are often unintelligible to an English reader, but in this instance I will explain. "Sticking up" is merely a concise colonial rendering of "Your money or your life," and was originally employed by Australian bushrangers, those terrible freebooters whose ranks used to be always recruited from escaped convicts. Fortunately we had no community of that class, only a few prisoners kept in a little ricketty wooden house in Christchurch, from which an enterprising baby might easily have escaped. I dare say as we get more civilized out there, we shall build ourselves handsome prisons and penitentiaries; but in those early days a story was current of a certain jailor who let all his captives out on some festal occasion, using the tremendous threat, that whoever had not returned by eight o'clock should be "locked out!"
But to return to that particular winter evening. We had been telling each other stories which we had heard or read of bushranging exploits, until we were all as nervous as possible. Ghosts, or even burglar stories, are nothing to the horror of a true bushranger story, and F—— had made himself particularly ghastly and disagreeable by giving a minute account of an adventure which had been told to him by one of the survivors.
We listened, with the wind howling outside, to F——'s horrid second-hand story, of how one fine day up country, eight or ten men,—station hands,—were "stuck up" by one solitary bushranger, armed to the teeth. He tied them up one by one, and seated them all on a bench in the sun, and deliberately fired at and wounded the youngest of the party; then, seized with compunction, he unbound one of the captives, and stood over him, revolver in hand, whilst he saddled and mounted a horse, to go for a doctor to set the poor boy's broken leg. Before the messenger had gone "a league, a league, but barely twa',"—the freebooter recollected that he might bring somebody else back with him besides the doctor, and flinging himself across his horse, rode after the affrighted man, and coolly shot him dead. I really don't know how the story ended: I believe everybody perished; but at this juncture I declared it to be impossible to sit up any longer to listen to such tragedies, and went to bed.