第47章 THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA(2)

Most men thus circumstanced contrive to buy or brutally manage to enforce their independence;but many vegetate without hope,strangled by parasites.

We had no cause to blush with Brother Michel.Our new parents were kind,gentle,well-mannered,and generous in gifts;the wife was a most motherly woman,the husband a man who stood justly high with his employers.Enough has been said to show why Moipu should be deposed;and in Paaaeua the French had found a reputable substitute.He went always scrupulously dressed,and looked the picture of propriety,like a dark,handsome,stupid,and probably religious young man hot from a European funeral.In character he seemed the ideal of what is known as the good citizen.He wore gravity like an ornament.None could more nicely represent the desired character as an appointed chief,the outpost of civilisation and reform.And yet,were the French to go and native manners to revive,fancy beholds him crowned with old men's beards and crowding with the first to a man-eating festival.But I must not seem to be unjust to Paaaeua.His respectability went deeper than the skin;his sense of the becoming sometimes nerved him for unexpected rigours.

One evening Captain Otis and Mr.Osbourne were on shore in the village.All was agog;dancing had begun;it was plain it was to be a night of festival,and our adventurers were overjoyed at their good fortune.A strong fall of rain drove them for shelter to the house of Paaaeua,where they were made welcome,wiled into a chamber,and shut in.Presently the rain took off,the fun was to begin in earnest,and the young bloods of Atuona came round the house and called to my fellow-travellers through the interstices of the wall.Late into the night the calls were continued and resumed,and sometimes mingled with taunts;late into the night the prisoners,tantalised by the noises of the festival,renewed their efforts to escape.But all was vain;right across the door lay that god-fearing householder,Paaaeua,feigning sleep;and my friends had to forego their junketing.In this incident,so delightfully European,we thought we could detect three strands of sentiment.In the first place,Paaaeua had a charge of souls:these were young men,and he judged it right to withhold them from the primrose path.Secondly,he was a public character,and it was not fitting that his guests should countenance a festival of which he disapproved.So might some strict clergyman at home address a worldly visitor:'Go to the theatre if you like,but,by your leave,not from my house!'Thirdly,Paaaeua was a man jealous,and with some cause (as shall be shown)for jealousy;and the feasters were the satellites of his immediate rival,Moipu.

For the adoption had caused much excitement in the village;it made the strangers popular.Paaaeua,in his difficult posture of appointed chief,drew strength and dignity from their alliance,and only Moipu and his followers were malcontent.For some reason nobody (except myself)appears to dislike Moipu.Captain Hart,who has been robbed and threatened by him;Father Orens,whom he has fired at,and repeatedly driven to the woods;my own family,and even the French officials -all seemed smitten with an irrepressible affection for the man.His fall had been made soft;his son,upon his death,was to succeed Paaaeua in the chieftaincy;and he lived,at the time of our visit,in the shoreward part of the village in a good house,and with a strong following of young men,his late braves and pot-hunters.In this society,the coming of the CASCO,the adoption,the return feast on board,and the presents exchanged between the whites and their new parents,were doubtless eagerly and bitterly canvassed.It was felt that a few years ago the honours would have gone elsewhere.In this unwonted business,in this reception of some hitherto undreamed-of and outlandish potentate -some Prester John or old Assaracus -a few years back it would have been the part of Moipu to play the hero and the host,and his young men would have accompanied and adorned the various celebrations as the acknowledged leaders of society.

And now,by a malign vicissitude of fortune,Moipu must sit in his house quite unobserved;and his young men could but look in at the door while their rivals feasted.Perhaps M.Grevy felt a touch of bitterness towards his successor when he beheld him figure on the broad stage of the centenary of eighty-nine;the visit of the CASCOwhich Moipu had missed by so few years was a more unusual occasion in Atuona than a centenary in France;and the dethroned chief determined to reassert himself in the public eye.