That night we went to the ball at Government House; and there for the first time we saw a representative gathering of Colonial society in New Zealand, and then we banished for ever all our lurking unbelief in the vaunted wit and beauty we had hitherto met only in such isolated cases that it was scarcely wonderful we could not entirely credit it. There were one or two really beautiful women at the ball, and nearly all the girls were pretty, with lovely complexions and very daintily dressed. Mrs Greendays was happy as a fairy, for she loves dancing, and her husband seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself too, though he always affects scorn of such frivolity.
For me neither the good floor nor the pretty women constituted the charm that made that scene my happiest memory of Wellington. The thought of the fast-approaching farewell to the dear Man of Comfort had been growing more and more unbearable all day, for this time there appeared to be no possible chance of ever seeing him again unless we met at home in the dim future. The thought of all our happy days together, and of the dull ones without him that were to come, conspiring with a thousand things I wanted to say before it was too late, made a wall in my throat that speech could not leap.
My partners must have thought me very dull and stupid during the first part of the evening until after a set of Lancers that I sat out with Colonel Deane. It was a lovely moonlight night, the sea as calm as a sheet of ornamental water, with a few little clouds sailing in the sky, and as we looked at it I was thinking that to-morrow night we would both be sailing on that cruel, dividing ocean but in opposite directions, he to Onehunga from New Plymouth, we to Nelson.
He must have been thinking of it too, for he said,
“How strange it will be to travel over the same road alone to-morrow that we travelled together so happily yesterday! I shall be thinking as my friend David the Dreamer thought, when he wrote,
“And now as by the sea I ride
To watch awhile the wand’ring ships,
Some boastful billow on the tide
That has blown spray upon thy lips,
With flying hair and weeds entwined
Goes by, and laughs, deriding me
With a loud shout that wakes the blind
And moaning Monarch, Memory.”
I could not speak for a moment, and then I asked him to tell me the name of the poet he was always quoting. I had asked him often before, but he never would say who it was. But now his reply, though it was barely a promise, made me forget all about the ugly adieux so fast approaching.
“At Milford Sound I will tell you,” he said.
