*CHAPTER VI.*
*MIDNIGHT ALARMS.*
After his return home, Edwin felt as if mud and rain had takenpossession of the outside world. The rivulet in the valley had become araging torrent. All the glamour of the woods was gone. The fern-coveredhills looked gaunt and brown. The clumps of flax and rush bent theirflattened heads low in the muddy swamp before the piercing night winds.The old trees in the orchard were shattered, and their broken branches,still cumbering the ground, looked drear and desolate. The overgrowthof leaf and stalk presented a mass of decaying vegetation, dank andsodden.
One chill May morning brought a heavy snow, veiling the calm crests ofthe majestic hills with dazzling whiteness, becoming more intense andvivid as their drapery of mist and storm-cloud blackened. All movementseemed absorbed by the foaming cascades, tearing down the rifts andgullies in the valley slope. Every sign of life was restricted to aghostly-looking gull, sated with dead rabbit, winging its heavy flightto the blue-black background of dripping rock.
But in this England of the Southern Seas the winter changes as itchanges in the British Isles. Sharp, frosty nights succeeded. Theground grew crisp to the tread. The joyous work in the woods began.Mr. Lee went daily to his allotment with axe on shoulder and his boys byhis side. His skill in woodcraft was telling. Many of the smallertrees had already fallen beneath his vigorous stroke, when therabbiters--who glean their richest harvest in the winternights--reappeared. They were so used to the reckless ways of theordinary colonist--who cuts and slashes and burns right hand and leftuntil the coast is clear--that Mr. Lee's methodical proceedings began tointerest them. His first step was to clear away the useless undergrowthand half-grown trees, gaining room for charcoal fires, and for stacks ofbark which his boys were stripping from the fallen trunks. His rovingneighbours promised to leave their traps and snares, and help him tobring down the forest giants which he was marking for destruction.
One June evening, as the Lees were returning from a hard day's work,they passed the rabbiters going out as usual to begin their own. Aslight tremor in the ground attracted the attention of both parties. Asthey exchanged their customary good-night, one of the rabbiters observedthere was an ugly look about the sky.
The boys grumbled to each other that there was an ugly look about theground. Although thousands of little brown heads and flopping ears werebobbing about among the withered thistle-stalks, thousands more werelying dead behind every loose stone or weedy tuft.
The ghoul-like gulls were hovering in increasing numbers, some alreadypouncing on their prey and crying to their fellows wheeling inland fromthe distant shore. No other sound disturbed the silence of the bush.The sense of profound repose deepened as they reached their home. ToMr. Lee it seemed an ominous stillness, like the lull before the storm;but in the cheerful light of his blazing fire he shook off the feeling.
The weary boys soon went to bed. For the present they were sleeping inthe same room as their father, who slowly followed their example.
It was nearly midnight, when Edwin was awakened with a dim feeling ofsomething the matter. Cuthbert was pulling him. "Edwin! Edwin!"
"What is it?" he cried. Edwin's hurried exclamation was lost in thebang and rattle all around. Were the windows coming in? He sprangupright as the bed was violently shaken, and the brothers were tossedupon each other.
"What now?" called out Mr. Lee, as the floor swayed and creaked, and hefelt himself rolling over in the very moment of waking. The walls werebeginning a general waltz, when the noise of falling crockery in theouter room and the howling of the rabbiters' dogs drowned every othersound.
A sickly, helpless sensation stole over them all, Mr. Lee too, aseverything around them became as suddenly still--an eerie feeling whichcould not be shaken off. The boys lay hushed in a state of nervoustension, not exactly fear, but as if their senses were dumfoundered andall their being centred in a focus of expectation.
Effie gave a suppressed scream. Mr. Lee was speaking to her through thewall. "It is over, my dear--it is over; don't be frightened," he wassaying.
"It--what it?" asked Cuthbert, drawing his head under the bed-clothes.
"Our first taste of earthquake," returned his father; "and a prettysharp one, I fancy."
At this announcement Cuthbert made a speedy remove to his father's bed,and cuddled down in the blankets. Mr. Lee walked round the room andlooked out of the window. It was intensely dark; he could see nothing.
"Oh my head!" they heard Audrey saying; "it aches so strangely."
Mr. Lee repeated his consolatory assurance that it was over, andreturned to bed, giving way to the natural impulse to lie still whichthe earthquake seemed to produce. The violence of the headache everyone was experiencing made them thankful to lie down once more; but restwas out of the question. In a little while all began again; not aviolent shock, as at the first, but a continual quaking.
Mr. Lee got up and dressed. He was afraid to light a lamp, for fear itshould be upset; so he persuaded his children to keep in bed, thinkingthey would be rolled down in the darkness by the heaving of the floor.He groped his way into the outer room, treading upon broken earthenwareat every step. This was making bad worse. He went back and lit a match.It was just two o'clock.
Audrey, who heard him moving about, got up also, and began to dress,being troubled at the destruction of the plates and dishes. In tenminutes they were startled by a fearful subterranean roar. Edwin couldlie still no longer. He sprang up, and was hurrying on his clothes,when the house shook with redoubled violence. Down came shelves, updanced chairs. The bang and crash, followed by a heavy thud justoverhead, made Edwin and his father start back to opposite sides of theroom as the roof gave way, and a ton weight of thatch descended on thebed Edwin had just vacated.
"The chimney!" exclaimed Mr. Lee. "The chimney is down!"
The dancing walls seemed ready to follow. Cuthbert was grabbing at hisshoes. Mr. Lee ran to the door, thinking of his girls in the otherroom.
"Audrey! Effie!" he shouted, "are you hurt?"
But the weight of the falling thatch kept the door from opening. He sawthe window was bulging outwards. He seized a stick standing in thecorner, and tried to wrench away the partition boarding between him andhis daughters. But the slight shake this gave to the building broughtdown another fall of thatch, filling the room with dust. Edwin justescaped a blow from a beam; but the darkness was terrific, and theintense feeling of oppression increased the frantic desire to get out.
"In another moment the whole place will be about our ears!" exclaimedMr. Lee, forcing the window outwards, and pushing the boys before himinto the open. He saw--no, he could not see, but rather felt the wholebuilding was tottering to its fall. "Let the horses loose!" he shoutedto Edwin, as he ran round to the front of the house to extricate thegirls.
The boom as of distant cannon seemed to fill the air.
"O Lord above, what is it?" ejaculated one of the rabbiters, who hadheard the chimney go down, and was hurrying to Mr. Lee's assistance.
Again the heavy roll as of cannon seemed to reverberate along thedistant shore.
"It is a man-of-war in distress off Manakau Head," cried a comrade.
"That! man, that is but the echo; the noise is from the hills. There ishot work among the Maoris, maybe. They are game enough for anything.The cannon is there," averred old Hal, the leader of the gang.
"Then it is that Nga-Hepe blowing up the Rota Pah by way of revenge,"exclaimed the first speaker.
Edwin had opened the stable-door, and was running after his father. Hecaught the name Nga-Hepe, and heard old Hal's reply,--
"He buy cannon indeed, when the muru took away his all not three monthssince!"
Edwin passed the speaker, and overtaking his father in the darkness, hewhispered, "The man may be right. Nga-Hepe's wife buried his money bythe roadside, by the twin pines, father. I saw her do it."
"Ah!" answered Mr. Lee
, as he sprang up the veranda steps and rapped onAudrey's window. As she threw it open a gruff voice spoke to Edwin outof the darkness.
"So it was money Marileha buried?"
But Edwin gave no reply. Mr. Lee was holding out his arms to Erne, whohad scrambled upon the window-sill, and stood there trembling, afraid totake the leap he recommended.
"Wrap her in a blanket, Audrey, and slide her down," said their father.
Edwin was on the sill beside her in a moment. The blanket Audrey wasdragging forward was seized and flung around the little trembler,enveloping head, arms, and feet. Mr. Lee caught the lower end, anddrawing it down, received his "bonnie birdie" in his fatherly arms.Edwin leaped into the darkness within.
"Quick, Audrey, quick, or the house will fall upon us," he urged.
She was snatching at this and that, and tying up a bundle in haste.Edwin pulled out another blanket from the tumbled bed-clothes, and flungit on the window-sill.
"No, no," said Audrey; "I'll jump."
She tossed her bundle before her, and setting herself low on her feet,she gave one hand to her father and the other to the gruff speaker whohad startled Edwin in the darkness. They swung her to the groundbetween them just as the log-built walls began to roll. Edwin wasdriven back among the ruins, crouching under the bulrush thatch, whichlay in heaps by the debris of beam and chimney, snug like a rabbit inits burrow, whilst beam and prop were falling around him. He heardCuthbert calling desperately, "Look, look! father, father! the world'son fire!"
Edwin tugged furiously at the mass of dry and dusty rushes in which hehad become enveloped, working with hands and feet, groping his way tospace and air once more. The grand but terrific sight which met hisgaze struck him backwards, and he sank confounded on the heap, fromwhich he had scarcely extricated himself.
The sacred Maori hills, which at sunset had reared their snowy crests inmajestic calm, were ablaze with fire. The intensity of the glare fromthe huge pillar of flame, even at so great a distance, was more thaneyes could bear. With both hands extended before his face to veil thetoo terrific light, Edwin lay entranced. That vision of a thousand feetof ascending flame, losing itself in a dome of cloud blacker and denserthan the blackness of midnight, might well prelude the day of doom.Unable to bear the sight or yet to shut it out, he watched in dumbamazement. White meteor globes of star-like brilliancy shot from out thepall of cloud in every direction, and shed a blue unearthly light on allaround. They came with the roar as of cannon, and the rocks were rivenby their fall. Huge fissures, opening in the mountain sides, emittedstreams of rolling fire.
Edwin forgot his own peril and the peril of all around, lost in theimmensity of the sight. The cries and groans of the rabbiters recalledhim. Some had thrown themselves on their faces in a paroxysm of terror.Old Hal had fallen on his knees, believing the end of the world hadcome.
Edwin heard his father's voice rising calm and clear above the gaspingejaculations and snatches of half-forgotten prayer.
"Would you court blindness? Shut your eyes to the awful sight. It isan eruption of Mount Tarawera. Remember, Hal, we are in the hands ofOne whom storm and fire obey."
The play of the lightning around the mountain-head became so intensethat the glare from the huge column of volcanic fire could scarcely bedistinguished. The jagged, forked flashes shot downwards to theshuddering forest, and tree after tree was struck to earth, and firesprang up in glade and thicket.
"To the open!" shouted Mr. Lee, blindfolding Cuthbert with hishandkerchief, and shrouding Effie in the blanket, as he carried hertowards the recent clearing.
Cuthbert grasped his father's coat with both hands, and stumbled on byhis side. A dull, red spot in the distance marked the place where thecharcoal fires were smouldering still, just as Mr. Lee had left them.
He laid his burden down in the midst of the circling heaps, which shed awarmth and offered something of a shelter from the rising blast. It wasthe safest spot in which he could leave the two; and charging Cuthbertto be a man and take care of his sister, he hurried away to look forEdwin.
With their backs against the sods which covered over the charring wood,the children sat with their arms round each other's necks, huddledtogether in the blanket, all sense of loneliness and fear of being leftby themselves absorbed in the awe of the night.
Inspired by Mr. Lee's example, old Hal had rallied. He had caughtBeauty, and was putting him in the cart. Audrey, with her recoveredbundle on her arm, with the quiet self-possession which never seemed todesert her, was bringing him the harness from the new-built shed, whichwas still standing.
The gruff rabbiter, who had been the first to come to Mr. Lee'sassistance, followed her for a fork to move the heaps of thatch whichhemmed Edwin in. He was crossing to the ruined house with it poised uponhis shoulder as Mr. Lee came up. He saw the lightning flash across thesteel, and dashed the fork from the man's insensate grasp. The fellowstaggered backwards and fell a senseless heap. Star-like rays wereshooting from each pointing tine as the fork touched the ground, andlines of fire ran from them in every direction. Edwin saw it also, andseizing a loosened tie-beam, he gave the great heap of thatch before hima tremendous heave, and sent it over. The sodden mass of rush, heavywith frozen snow, broke to pieces as it fell, and changed the runningfire to a dense cloud of smoke.
A deep-voiced "Bravo, young un!" broke from the horror-strickenrabbiters, who had gathered round their comrade. But Mr. Lee was beforethem. He had loosened the man's collar and torn open his shirt. In theplay of the cold night air his chest gave a great heave. A sigh ofthankfulness ran round the group. The lightning he had so unthinkinglydrawn down upon himself had not struck a vital part.
Audrey had dropped her bundle, and was filling her lap with the frozenflags by the edge of the stream.
They dragged him away from the smoke, and Audrey's icy gleanings wereheaped upon his burning head. A twitch of the nostrils was followed bya deep groan.
"He'll do," said Hal. "He's a coming round, thank God!"
With a low-breathed Amen, Mr. Lee turned away, for the cloud of smokehis boy had raised completely concealed him. The cheery "All right"which answered his shout for his son put new life into the whole party.
Audrey and her father ran quickly to the end of the house. The greatbeam of the roof was cleared, and Edwin was cautiously making his wayacross it on his hands and knees.
"Stand back!" he cried, as he neared the end, and, with a flying leapand hands outspread he cleared the broken wall, and alighted uninjuredon the ground.
Mr. Lee caught hold of him, and Audrey grasped both hands.
"I'm all right," he retorted; "don't you bother about me."
A terrible convulsion shook the ground; the men flung themselves ontheir faces. A splendid kauri tree one hundred and seventy feet high,which shaded the entrance of the valley, was torn up by the roots, as anawful blast swept down the forest glades with annihilating force. Thecrash, the shock reverberating far and wide, brought with it such asense of paralyzing helplessness even Mr. Lee gave up all for lost.
They lifted up their heads, and saw red-hot stones flying into the airand rolling down the riven slopes.
"O my little lambs!" groaned Mr. Lee, thinking of the two he had left bythe charcoal fires, "what am I doing lying here, and you by yourselvesin the open?"
"Get 'em away," said Hal; "the cart is still there. Put 'em all in, andgallop off towards the shore; it's our only safety."
There was too much weight in the old man's words to disregard them. Mr.Lee looked round for his other horse, which had rushed over him at a madbound when the last tree fell. He saw it now, its coat staring with thefright, stealing back to its companion.