Page:Brown·Bread·from·a·Colonial·Oven-Baughan-1912.pdf/38

 an’ they smuggled her out o’ the Bay, an’ Joe never got her again.

“Eh dear! I remember Roimata said a thing that afternoon, though, as must ha’ made mother feel a real Christian to help her after. You see, the Maori women’s ways wasn’t just our ways, nor our men hadn’t helped ’em, mostly, to be so; an’ while Roimata an’ mother was a-talkin’ friendly together that afternoon, Roimata, she says, quite innocent, ‘An’ how many men,’ she says, ‘you had?’ ‘Me? Why, whatever does the woman take me for? Why, one, of course, an’ that my own lawful wedded husband!’ cries mother, a-bridlin’ an’ a-bristlin’ of herself till she didn’t look like the same woman—she was a meek-lookin’ woman, mother was, an’ pretty too, even to a Maori taste, it seemed; for Roimata, she puts her head on one side, an’ lookin’ at her kind of sly, ‘Too much the lie!’ says she, quite positive, as if you couldn’t hope to take her in about it—she knew better than you, if needful. ‘E! too much the lie!’ she says, an’ looked so sure, that mother she gave up bein’ angry all of a sudden an’ just burst out a-laughin’. ‘The poor heathen!’ says mother, as soon as she could speak, an’ ever after that she always spoke of Roimata as ‘that poor heathen.’

“Yes, that Joe, an’ some o’ the others, was proper bad lots, so they was! Poor mother, she went in terror of her life of ’em, at one time; for they’d get them liquor down from Town, an’ there they’d take an’ drink it till it was done (an’ they done too, pretty nigh), in a little rotten shanty near to ours on the shore, that they called ‘the Old House at Home.’ I used to think it wasn’t any wonder