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.