“Oh, beloved friends, remember the little boy and the meiboss; remember the young girl and the young man; remember the lake, the fire, and the brimstone; remember the suicide’s skeleton on the pitchy billows of Mount Etna; remember the voice of warning that has this day sounded in your ears; and what I say to you I say to all—watch! May the Lord add his blessings!”
Here the Bible closed with a tremendous thud. Tant Sannie loosened the white handkerchief about her neck and wiped her eyes, and the coloured girl, seeing her do so, sniffled. She did not understand the discourse, which made it the more affecting.
There hung over it that inscrutable charm which hovers forever for the human intellect over the incomprehensible and shadowy. When the last hymn was sung the German conducted the officiator to Tant Sannie, who graciously extended her hand, and offered coffee and a seat on the sofa. Leaving him there, the German hurried away to see how the little plum-pudding he had left at home was advancing; and Tant Sannie remarked that it was a hot day. Bonaparte gathered her meaning as she fanned herself with the end of her apron. He bowed low in acquiescence. A long silence followed. Tant Sannie spoke again. Bonaparte gave her no ear; his eye was fixed on a small miniature on the opposite wall, which represented Tant Sannie as she had appeared on the day before her confirmation, fifteen years before, attired in green muslin. Suddenly he started to his feet, walked up to the picture, and took his stand before it. Long and wistfully he gazed into its features; it was easy to see that he was deeply moved. With a sudden movement, as though no longer able to restrain himself, he seized the picture, loosened it from its nail, and held it close to his eyes. At length, turning to the Boer-woman, he said, in a voice of deep emotion:
“You will, I trust, dear madam, excuse this exhibition of my feelings; but this—this little picture recalls to me my first and best beloved, my dear departed wife, who is now a saint in heaven.”
Tant Sannie could not understand; but the Hottentot maid, who had taken her seat on the floor beside her mistress, translated the English into Dutch as far as she was able.
“Ah, my first, my beloved!” he added, looking tenderly down at the picture. “Oh, the beloved, the beautiful lineaments! My angel wife! This is surely a sister of yours, madame?” he added, fixing his eyes on Tant Sannie.
The Dutchwoman blushed, shook her head, and pointed to herself.
Carefully, intently, Bonaparte looked from the picture in his hand to Tant Sannie’s features, and from the features back to the picture. Then slowly a light broke over his countenance, he looked up, it became a smile; he looked back at the miniature, his whole countenance was effulgent.
“Ah, yes; I see it now,” he cried, turning his delighted gaze on the Boer-woman; “eyes, mouth, nose, chin, the very expression!” he cried. “How is it possible I did not notice it before?”
“Take another cup of coffee,” said Tant Sannie. “Put some sugar in.”
Bonaparte hung the picture tenderly up, and was turning to take the cup from her hand, when the German appeared, to say that the pudding was ready and the meat on the table.
“He’s a God-fearing man, and one who knows how to behave himself,” said the Boer-woman as he went out at the door. “If he’s ugly, did not the Lord make him? And are we to laugh at the Lord’s handiwork? It is better to be ugly and good than pretty and bad; though of course it’s nice when one is both,” said Tant Sannie, looking complacently at the picture on the wall.
In the afternoon the German and Bonaparte sat before the door of the cabin. Both smoked in complete silence—Bonaparte with a book in his hands and his eyes half closed; the German puffing vigorously, and glancing up now and again at the serene blue sky overhead.
“Supposing—you—you, in fact, made the remark to me,” burst forth the German suddenly, “that you were looking for a situation.”
Bonaparte opened his mouth wide, and sent a stream of smoke through his lips.
“Now supposing,” said the German—“merely supposing, of course—that some one, some one, in fact, should make an offer to you, say, to become schoolmaster on their farm and teach two children, two little girls, perhaps, and would give you forty pounds a year, would you accept it? Just supposing, of course.”
“Well, my dear friend,” said Bonaparte, “that would depend on circumstances. Money is no consideration with me. For my wife I have made provision for the next year. My health is broken. Could I meet a place where a gentleman would be treated as a gentleman I would accept it, however small the remuneration. With me,” said Bonaparte, “money is no consideration.”
“Well,” said the German, when he had taken a whiff or two more from his pipe, “I think I shall go up and see Tant Sannie a little. I go up often on Sunday afternoon to have a general conversation, to see her, you know. Nothing—nothing particular, you know.”
The old man put his book into his pocket, and walked up to the farmhouse with a peculiarly knowing and delighted expression of countenance.
“He doesn’t suspect what I’m going to do,” soliloquized the German; “hasn’t the least idea. A nice surprise for him.”
The man whom he had left at his doorway winked at the retreating figure with a wink that was not to be described.
“Ah, what is the matter?” asked Waldo, stopping at the foot of the ladder with a load of skins on his back that he was carrying up to the loft. Through the open door in the gable little Em was visible, her feet dangling from the high bench on which she sat. The room, once a storeroom, had been divided by a row of mealie bags into two parts—the back being Bonaparte’s bedroom, the front his schoolroom.
“Lyndall made him angry,” said the girl tearfully; “and he has given me the fourteenth of John to learn. He says he will teach me to behave myself when Lyndall troubles him.”
“What did she do?” asked the boy.
“You see,” said Em, hopelessly turning the leaves, “whenever he talks she looks out at the door, as though she did not hear him. Today she asked him what the signs of the Zodiac were, and he said he was surprised that she should ask him; it was not a fit and proper thing for little girls to talk about. Then she asked him who Copernicus was; and he said he was one of the Emperors of Rome, who burned the Christians in a golden pig, and the worms ate him up while he was still alive. I don’t know why,” said Em plaintively, “but she just put her books under her arm and walked out; and she will never come to his school again, she says, and she always does what she says. And now I must sit here every day alone,” said Em, the great tears dropping softly.
“Perhaps Tant Sannie will send him away,” said the boy, in his mumbling way, trying to comfort her.
“No,” said Em, shaking her head; “no. Last night when the little Hottentot maid was washing her feet, he told her he liked such feet, and that fat women were so nice to him; and she said I must always put pure cream in his coffee now. No; he’ll never go away,” said Em dolorously.
The boy put down his skins and fumbled in his pocket, and produced a small piece of paper containing something. He stuck it out toward her.
“There, take it for you,” he said. This was by way of comfort.
Em opened it and found a small bit of gum, a commodity prized by the children; but the great tears dropped down slowly on to it.
Waldo was distressed. He had cried so much in his morsel of life that tears in another seemed to burn him.
“If,” he said, stepping in awkwardly and standing by the table, “if you will not cry I will tell you something—a secret.”
“What is that?” asked Em, instantly becoming decidedly better.
“You will tell it to no human being?”
“No.”
He bent nearer to her, and with deep solemnity said:
“I have made a machine!”
Em opened her eyes.
“Yes; a machine for shearing sheep. It is almost done,” said the boy. “There is only one thing that is not right yet; but it will be soon. When you think, and think, and think, all night and all day, it comes at last,” he added mysteriously.
“Where is it?”
“Here! I always carry it here,” said the boy, putting his hand to his breast, where a bulging-out was visible. “This is a model. When it is done they will have to make a large one.”
“Show it me.”
The boy shook his head.
“No, not till it is done. I cannot let any human being see it till then.”
“It is a beautiful secret,” said Em; and the boy shuffled out to pick up his skins.
That evening father and son sat in the cabin eating their supper. The father sighed deeply sometimes. Perhaps he thought how long a time it was since Bonaparte had visited the cabin; but his son was in that land in which sighs have no part. It is a question whether it were not better to be the shabbiest of fools, and know the way up the little stair of imagination to the land of dreams, than the wisest of men, who see nothing that the eyes do not show, and feel nothing that the hands do not touch. The boy chewed his brown bread and drank his coffee; but in truth he saw only his machine finished—that last something found out and added. He saw it as it worked with beautiful smoothness; and over and above, as he chewed his bread and drank his coffee, there was that delightful consciousness of something bending over him and loving him. It would not have been better in one of the courts of heaven, where the walls are set with rows of the King of Glory’s amethysts and milk-white pearls, than there, eating his supper in that little room.
As they sat in silence there was a knock at the door. When it was opened the small woolly head of a little nigger showed itself. She was a messenger from Tant Sannie: the German was wanted at once at the homestead. Putting on his hat with both hands, he hurried off. The kitchen was in darkness, but in the pantry beyond Tant Sannie and her maids were assembled.
A Kaffer girl, who had been grinding pepper between two stones, knelt on the floor, the lean Hottentot stood with a brass candlestick in her hand, and Tant Sannie, near the shelf, with a hand on each hip, was evidently listening intently, as were her companions.
“What may be it?” cried the old German in astonishment. The room beyond the pantry was the storeroom. Through the thin wooden partition there arose at that instant, evidently from some creature ensconced there, a prolonged and prodigious howl, followed by a succession of violent blows against the partition wall.
The German seized the churn-stick, and was about to rush round the house, when the Boer-woman impressively laid her hand upon his arm.
“That is his head,” said Tant Sannie, “that is his head.”
“But what might it be?” asked the German, looking from one to the other, churn-stick in hand.
A low hollow bellow prevented reply, and the voice of Bonaparte lifted itself on high.
“Mary-Ann! my angel! my wife!”
“Isn’t it dreadful?” said Tant Sannie, as the blows were repeated fiercely. “He has got a letter; his wife is dead. You must go and comfort him,” said Tant Sannie at last, “and I will go with you. It would not be the thing for me to go alone—me, who am only thirty-three, and he an unmarried man now,” said Tant Sannie, blushing and smoothing out her apron.
Upon this they all trudged round the house in company—the Hottentot maid carrying the light, Tant Sannie and the German following, and the Kaffer girl bringing up the rear.
“Oh,” said Tant Sannie, “I see now it wasn’t wickedness made him do without his wife so long—only necessity.”
At the door she motioned to the German to enter, and followed him closely. On the stretcher behind the sacks Bonaparte lay on his face, his head pressed into a pillow, his legs kicking gently. The Boer-woman sat down on a box at the foot of the bed. The German stood with folded hands looking on.
“We must all die,” said Tant Sannie at last; “it is the dear Lord’s will.”
Hearing her voice, Bonaparte turned himself on to his back.
“It’s very hard,” said Tant Sannie, “I know, for I’ve lost two husbands.”
Bonaparte looked up into the German’s face.
“Oh, what does she say? Speak to me words of comfort!”
The German repeated Tant Sannie’s remark.
“Ah, I—I also! Two dear, dear wives, whom I shall never see any more!” cried Bonaparte, flinging himself back upon the bed.
He howled, till the tarantulas, who lived between the rafters and the zinc roof, felt the unusual vibration, and looked out with their wicked bright eyes, to see what was going on.
Tant Sannie sighed, the Hottentot maid sighed, the Kaffer girl who looked in at the door put her hand over her mouth and said “Mow-wah!”
“You must trust in the Lord,” said Tant Sannie. “He can give you more than you have lost.”
“I do, I do!” he cried; “but oh, I have no wife! I have no wife!”
Tant Sannie was much affected, and came and stood near the bed.
“Ask him if he won’t have a little pap—nice, fine, flour pap. There is some boiling on the kitchen fire.”
The German made the proposal, but the widower waved his hand.
“No, nothing shall pass my lips. I should be suffocated. No, no! Speak not of food to me!”
“Pap, and a little brandy in,” said Tant Sannie coaxingly.
Bonaparte caught the word.
“Perhaps, perhaps—if I struggled with myself—for the sake of my duties I might imbibe a few drops,” he said, looking with quivering lip up into the German’s face. “I must do my duty, must I not?”
Tant Sannie gave the order, and the girl went for the pap.
“I know how it was when my first husband died. They could do nothing with me,” the Boer-woman said, “till I had eaten a sheep’s trotter, and honey, and a little roaster-cake. I know.”
Bonaparte sat up on the bed with his legs stretched out in front of him, and a hand on each knee, blubbering softly.
“Oh, she was a woman! You are very kind to try and comfort me, but she was my wife. For a woman that is my wife I could live; for the woman that is my wife I could die! For a woman that is my wife I could—Ah! that sweet word ‘wife’; when will it rest upon my lips again?”
When his feelings had subsided a little he raised the corners of his turned-down mouth, and spoke to the German with flabby lips.
“Do you think she understands me? Oh, tell her every word, that she may know I thank her.”
At that instant the girl reappeared with a basin of steaming gruel and a black bottle.
Tant Sannie poured some of its contents into the basin, stirred it well, and came to the bed.
“Oh, I can’t, I can’t! I shall die! I shall die!” said Bonaparte, putting his hands to his side.
“Come, just a little,” said Tant Sannie coaxingly; “just a drop.”
“It’s too thick, it’s too thick. I should choke.”
Tant Sannie added from the contents of the bottle and held out a spoonful; Bonaparte opened his mouth like a little bird waiting for a worm, and held it open, as she dipped again and again into the pap.
“Ah, this will do your heart good,” said Tant Sannie, in whose mind the relative functions of heart and stomach were exceedingly ill-defined.
When the basin was emptied the violence of his grief was much assuaged; he looked at Tant Sannie with gentle tears.
“Tell him,” said the Boer-woman, “that I hope he will sleep well, and that the Lord will comfort him, as the Lord only can.”
“Bless you, dear friend, God bless you,” said Bonaparte.
When the door was safely shut on the German, the Hottentot, and the Dutchwoman, he got off the bed and washed away the soap he had rubbed on his eyelids.
“Bon,” he said, slapping his leg, “you’re the cutest lad I ever came across. If you don’t turn out the old Hymns-and-prayers, and pummel the Ragged coat, and get your arms round the fat one’s waist and a wedding-ring on her finger, then you are not Bonaparte. But you are Bonaparte. Bon, you’re a fine boy!”
Making which pleasing reflection, he pulled off his trousers and got into bed cheerfully.
“May I come in? I hope I do not disturb you, my dear friend,” said Bonaparte, late one evening, putting his nose in at the cabin door, where the German and his son sat finishing their supper.
It was now two months since he had been installed as schoolmaster in Tant Sannie’s household, and he had grown mighty and more mighty day by day. He visited the cabin no more, sat close to Tant Sannie drinking coffee all the evening, and walked about loftily with his hands under the coat-tails of the German’s black cloth and failed to see even a nigger who wished him a deferential good morning. It was therefore with no small surprise that the German perceived Bonaparte’s red nose at the door.
“Walk in, walk in,” he said joyfully. “Boy, boy, see if there is any coffee left. Well, none. Make a fire. We have done supper, but—”
“My dear friend,” said Bonaparte, taking off his hat, “I came not to sup, not for mere creature comforts, but for an hour of brotherly intercourse with a kindred spirit. The press of business and the weight of thought, but they alone, may sometimes prevent me from sharing the secrets of my bosom with him for whom I have so great a sympathy. You perhaps wonder when I shall return the two pounds—”
“Oh, no, no! Make a fire, make a fire, boy. We will have a pot of hot coffee presently,” said the German, rubbing his hands and looking about, not knowing how best to show his pleasure at the unexpected visit.
For three weeks the German’s diffident “Good evening” had met with a stately bow; the chin of Bonaparte lifting itself higher daily; and his shadow had not darkened the cabin doorway since he came to borrow the two pounds. The German walked to the head of the bed and took down a blue bag that hung there. Blue bags were a speciality of the German’s. He kept above fifty stowed away in different corners of his room—some filled with curious stones, some with seeds that had been in his possession fifteen years, some with rusty nails, buckles, and bits of old harness—in all, a wonderful assortment, but highly prized.
“We have something here not so bad,” said the German, smiling knowingly, as he dived his hand into the bag and took out a handful of almonds and raisins; “I buy these for my chickens. They increase in size, but they still think the old man must have something nice for them. And the old man—well, a big boy may have a sweet tooth sometimes, may he not? Ha, ha!” said the German, chuckling at his own joke, as he heaped the plate with almonds. “Here is a stone—two stones to crack them—no late patent improvement—well, Adam’s nut-cracker; ha, ha! But I think we shall do. We will not leave them uncracked. We will consume a few without fashionable improvements.”
Here the German sat down on one side of the table, Bonaparte on the other; each one with a couple of flat stones before him, and the plate between them.
“Do not be afraid,” said the German, “do not be afraid. I do not forget the boy at the fire; I crack for him. The bag is full. Why, this is strange,” he said suddenly, cracking upon a large nut; “three kernels! I have not observed that before. This must be retained. This is valuable.” He wrapped the nut gravely in paper, and put it carefully in his waistcoat pocket. “Valuable, very valuable!” he said, shaking his head.
“Ah, my friend,” said Bonaparte, “what joy it is to be once more in your society.”
The German’s eyes glistened, and Bonaparte seized his hand and squeezed it warmly. They then proceeded to crack and eat. After a while Bonaparte said, stuffing a handful of raisins into his mouth:
“I was so deeply grieved, my dear friend, that you and Tant Sannie had some slight unpleasantness this evening.”
“Oh, no, no,” said the German; “it is all right now. A few sheep missing; but I make it good myself. I give my twelve sheep, and work in the other eight.”
“It is rather hard that you should have to make good the lost sheep,” said Bonaparte; “it is no fault of yours.”
“Well,” said the German, “this is the case. Last evening I count the sheep at the kraal—twenty are missing. I ask the herd; he tells me they are with the other flock; he tells me so distinctly; how can I think he lies? This afternoon I count the other flock. The sheep are not there. I come back here: the herd is gone; the sheep are gone. But I cannot—no, I will not—believe he stole them,” said the German, growing suddenly excited. “Some one else, but not he. I know that boy. I knew him three years. He is a good boy. I have seen him deeply affected on account of his soul. And she would send the police after him! I say I would rather make the loss good myself. I will not have it; he has fled in fear. I know his heart. It was,” said the German, with a little gentle hesitation, “under my words that he first felt his need of a Saviour.”
Bonaparte cracked some more almonds, then said, yawning, and more as though he asked for the sake of having something to converse about than from any interest he felt in the subject:
“And what has become of the herd’s wife?”
The German was alight again in a moment.
“Yes; his wife. She has a child six days old, and Tant Sannie would turn her out into the fields this night. That,” said the German rising, “that is what I call cruelty—diabolical cruelty. My soul abhors that deed. The man that could do such a thing I could run him through with a knife!” said the German, his grey eyes flashing, and his bushy black beard adding to the murderous fury of his aspect. Then suddenly subsiding, he said, “But all is now well; Tant Sannie gives her word that the maid shall remain for some days. I go to Oom Muller’s tomorrow to learn if the sheep may not be there. If they are not, then I return. They are gone, that is all. I make it good.”
“Tant Sannie is a singular woman,” said Bonaparte, taking the tobacco bag the German passed to him.
“Singular! Yes,” said the German; “but her heart is on her right side. I have lived long years with her, and I may say, I have for her an affection, which she returns. I may say,” added the German with warmth, “I may say, that there is not one soul on this farm for whom I have not an affection.”
“Ah, my friend,” said Bonaparte, “when the grace of God is in our hearts, is it not with us all? Do we not love the very worm we tread upon, and as we tread upon it? Do we know distinctions of race, or of sex, or of colour? No!
After a time he sank into a less fervent mood, and remarked:
“The coloured female who waits upon Tant Sannie appears to be of a virtuous disposition, an individual who—”
“Virtuous!” said the German; “I have confidence in her. There is that in her which is pure, that which is noble. The rich and high that walk this earth with lofty eyelids might exchange with her.”
The German here got up to bring a coal for Bonaparte’s pipe, and they sat together talking for a while. At length Bonaparte knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
“It is time that I took my departure, dear friend,” he said; “but, before I do so, shall we not close this evening of sweet communion and brotherly intercourse by a few words of prayer? Oh, how good and how pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the dew upon the mountains of Hermon; for there the Lord bestowed a blessing, even life for evermore.”
“Stay and drink some coffee,” said the German.
“No, thank you, my friend; I have business that must be done tonight,” said Bonaparte. “Your dear son appears to have gone to sleep. He is going to take the wagon to the mill tomorrow! What a little man he is.”
“A fine boy.”
But though the boy nodded before the fire he was not asleep; and they all knelt down to pray.
When they rose from their knees Bonaparte extended his hand to Waldo, and patted him on the head.
“Good night, my lad,” said he. “As you go to the mill tomorrow, we shall not see you for some days. Good night! Good-bye! The Lord bless and guide you; and may He bring you back to us in safety and find us all as you have left us!” He laid some emphasis on the last words. “And you, my dear friend,” he added, turning with redoubled warmth to the German, “long, long shall I look back to this evening as a time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, as an hour of blessed intercourse with a brother in Jesus. May such often return. The Lord bless you!” he added, with yet deeper fervour, “richly, richly.”
Then he opened the door and vanished out into the darkness.
“He, he, he!” laughed Bonaparte, as he stumbled over the stones. “If there isn’t the rarest lot of fools on this farm that ever God Almighty stuck legs to. He, he, he! When the worms come out then the blackbirds feed. Ha, ha, ha!” Then he drew himself up; even when alone he liked to pose with a certain dignity; it was second nature to him.
He looked in at the kitchen door. The Hottentot maid who acted as interpreter between Tant Sannie and himself was gone, and Tant Sannie herself was in bed.
“Never mind, Bon, my boy,” he said, as he walked round to his own room, “tomorrow will do. He, he, he!”
At four o’clock the next afternoon the German rode across the plain, returning from his search for the lost sheep. He rode slowly, for he had been in the saddle since sunrise and was somewhat weary, and the heat of the afternoon made his horse sleepy as it picked its way slowly along the sandy road. Every now and then a great red spider would start out of the karoo on one side of the path and run across to the other, but nothing else broke the still monotony. Presently, behind one of the highest of the milk-bushes that dotted the roadside, the German caught sight of a Kaffer woman, seated there evidently for such shadow as the milk-bush might afford from the sloping rays of the sun.
The German turned the horse’s head out of the road. It was not his way to pass a living creature without a word of greeting. Coming nearer, he found it was no other than the wife of the absconding Kaffer herd. She had a baby tied on her back by a dirty strip of red blanket; another strip hardly larger was twisted round her waist, for the rest her black body was naked. She was a sullen, ill-looking woman with lips hideously protruding.
The German questioned her as to how she came there. She muttered in broken Dutch that she had been turned away. Had she done evil? She shook her head sullenly. Had she had food given her? She grunted a negative, and fanned the flies from her baby. Telling the woman to remain where she was, he turned his horse’s head to the road and rode off at a furious pace.
“Hard-hearted! cruel! Oh, my God! Is this the way? Is this charity?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” ejaculated the old man as he rode on; but, presently, his anger began to evaporate, his horse’s pace slackened, and by the time he had reached his own door he was nodding and smiling.
Dismounting quickly, he went to the great chest where his provisions were kept. Here he got out a little meal, a little mealies, a few roaster-cakes. These he tied up in three blue handkerchiefs, and putting them into a sailcloth bag, he strung them over his shoulders. Then he looked circumspectly out at the door. It was very bad to be discovered in the act of giving; it made him red up to the roots of his old grizzled hair. No one was about, however, so he rode off again. Beside the milk-bush sat the Kaffer woman still—like Hagar, he thought, thrust out by her mistress in the wilderness to die. Telling her to loosen the handkerchief from her head, he poured into it the contents of his bag. The woman tied it up in sullen silence.
“You must try and get to the next farm,” said the German.
The woman shook her head; she would sleep in the field.
The German reflected. Kaffer women were accustomed to sleep in the open air; but then, the child was small, and after so hot a day the night might be chilly. That she would creep back to the huts at the homestead when the darkness favoured her, the German’s sagacity did not make evident to him. He took off the old brown salt-and-pepper coat, and held it out to her. The woman received it in silence, and laid it across her knee. “With that they will sleep warmly; not so bad. Ha, ha!” said the German. And he rode home, nodding his head in a manner that would have made any other man dizzy.
“I wish he would not come back tonight,” said Em, her face wet with tears.
“It will be just the same if he comes back tomorrow,” said Lyndall.
The two girls sat on the step of the cabin weeping for the German’s return. Lyndall shaded her eyes with her hand from the sunset light.
“There he comes,” she said, “whistling ‘Ach Jerusalem du schone’ so loud I can hear him from here.”
“Perhaps he has found the sheep.”
“Found them!” said Lyndall. “He would whistle just so if he knew he had to die tonight.”
“You look at the sunset, eh, chickens?” the German said, as he came up at a smart canter. “Ah, yes, that is beautiful!” he added, as he dismounted, pausing for a moment with his hand on the saddle to look at the evening sky, where the sun shot up long flaming streaks, between which and the eye thin yellow clouds floated. “Ei! you weep?” said the German, as the girls ran up to him.
Before they had time to reply the voice of Tant Sannie was heard.
“You child, of the child, of the child of a Kaffer’s dog, come here!”
The German looked up. He thought the Dutchwoman, come out to cool herself in the yard, called to some misbehaving servant. The old man looked round to see who it might be.
“You old vagabond of a praying German, are you deaf?”
Tant Sannie stood before the steps of the kitchen; upon them sat the lean Hottentot, upon the highest stood Bonaparte Blenkins, both hands folded under the tails of his coat, and his eyes fixed on the sunset sky.
The German dropped the saddle on the ground.
“Bish, bish, bish! what may this be?” he said, and walked toward the house. “Very strange!”
The girls followed him: Em still weeping; Lyndall with her face rather white and her eyes wide open.
“And I have the heart of a devil, did you say? You could run me through with a knife, could you?” cried the Dutchwoman. “I could not drive the Kaffer maid away because I was afraid of you, was I? Oh, you miserable rag! I loved you, did I? I would have liked to marry you, would I? would I? WOULD I?” cried the Boer-woman; “you cat’s tail, you dog’s paw! Be near my house tomorrow morning when the sun rises,” she gasped, “my Kaffers will drag you through the sand. They would do it gladly, any of them, for a bit of tobacco, for all your prayings with them.”
“I am bewildered, I am bewildered,” said the German, standing before her and raising his hand to his forehead; “I—I do not understand.”
“Ask him, ask him?” cried Tant Sannie, pointing to Bonaparte; “he knows. You thought he could not make me understand, but he did, he did, you old fool! I know enough English for that. You be here,” shouted the Dutchwoman, “when the morning star rises, and I will let my Kaffers take you out and drag you, till there is not one bone left in your old body that is not broken as fine as bobootie-meat, you old beggar! All your rags are not worth that—they should be thrown out onto the ash-heap,” cried the Boer-woman; “but I will have them for my sheep. Not one rotten hoof of your old mare do you take with you; I will have her—all, all for my sheep that you have lost, you godless thing!”
The Boer-woman wiped the moisture from her mouth with the palm of her hand.
The German turned to Bonaparte, who still stood on the step absorbed in the beauty of the sunset.
“Do not address me; do not approach me, lost man,” said Bonaparte, not moving his eye nor lowering his chin. “There is a crime from which all nature revolts; there is a crime whose name is loathsome to the human ear—that crime is yours; that crime is ingratitude. This woman has been your benefactress; on her farm you have lived; after her sheep you have looked; into her house you have been allowed to enter and hold Divine service—an honour of which you were never worthy; and how have you rewarded her?—basely, basely, basely!”
“But it is all false, lies and falsehoods. I must, I will speak,” said the German, suddenly looking round bewildered. “Do I dream? Are you mad? What may it be?”
“Go, dog,” cried the Dutchwoman; “I would have been a rich woman this day if it had not been for your laziness. Praying with the Kaffers behind the kraal walls. Go, you Kaffer’s dog!”
“But what then is the matter? What may have happened since I left?” said the German, turning to the Hottentot woman, who sat upon the step.
She was his friend; she would tell him kindly the truth. The woman answered by a loud, ringing laugh.
“Give it him, old missis! Give it him!”
It was so nice to see the white man who had been master hunted down. The coloured woman laughed, and threw a dozen mealie grains into her mouth to chew.
All anger and excitement faded from the old man’s face. He turned slowly away and walked down the little path to his cabin, with his shoulders bent; it was all dark before him. He stumbled over the threshold of his own well-known door.
Em, sobbing bitterly, would have followed him; but the Boer-woman prevented her by a flood of speech which convulsed the Hottentot, so low were its images.
“Come, Em,” said Lyndall, lifting her small proud head, “let us go in. We will not stay to hear such language.”
She looked into the Boer-woman’s eyes. Tant Sannie understood the meaning of the look if not the words. She waddled after them, and caught Em by the arm. She had struck Lyndall once years before, and had never done it again, so she took Em.
“So you will defy me, too, will you, you Englishman’s ugliness!” she cried, and with one hand she forced the child down, and held her head tightly against her knee; with the other she beat her first upon one cheek, and then upon the other.
For one instant Lyndall looked on, then she laid her small fingers on the Boer-woman’s arm. With the exertion of half its strength Tant Sannie might have flung the girl back upon the stones. It was not the power of the slight fingers, tightly though they clinched her broad wrist—so tightly that at bedtime the marks were still there; but the Boer-woman looked into the clear eyes and at the quivering white lips, and with a half-surprised curse relaxed her hold. The girl drew Em’s arm through her own.
“Move!” she said to Bonaparte, who stood in the door, and he, Bonaparte the invincible, in the hour of his triumph, moved to give her place.
The Hottentot ceased to laugh, and an uncomfortable silence fell on all the three in the doorway.
Once in their room, Em sat down on the floor and wailed bitterly. Lyndall lay on the bed with her arm drawn across her eyes, very white and still.
“Hoo, hoo!” cried Em; “and they won’t let him take the grey mare; and Waldo has gone to the mill. Hoo, hoo, and perhaps they won’t let us go and say good-bye to him. Hoo, hoo, hoo!”
“I wish you would be quiet,” said Lyndall without moving. “Does it give you such felicity to let Bonaparte know he is hurting you? We will ask no one. It will be suppertime soon. Listen—and when you hear the clink of the knives and forks we will go out and see him.”
Em suppressed her sobs and listened intently, kneeling at the door. Suddenly some one came to the window and put the shutter up.
“Who was that?” said Lyndall, starting.
“The girl, I suppose,” said Em. “How early she is this evening!”
But Lyndall sprang from the bed and seized the handle of the door, shaking it fiercely. The door was locked on the outside. She ground her teeth.
“What is the matter?” asked Em.
The room was in perfect darkness now.
“Nothing,” said Lyndall quietly; “only they have locked us in.”
She turned, and went back to bed again. But ere long Em heard a sound of movement. Lyndall had climbed up into the window, and with her fingers felt the woodwork that surrounded the panes. Slipping down, the girl loosened the iron knob from the foot of the bedstead, and climbing up again she broke with it every pane of glass in the window, beginning at the top and ending at the bottom.
“What are you doing?” asked Em, who heard the falling fragments.
Her companion made her no reply; but leaned on every little cross-bar, which cracked and gave way beneath her. Then she pressed with all her strength against the shutter. She had thought the wooden buttons would give way, but by the clinking sound she knew that the iron bar had been put across. She was quite quiet for a time. Clambering down, she took from the table a small one-bladed penknife, with which she began to peck at the hard wood of the shutter.
“What are you doing now?” asked Em, who had ceased crying in her wonder, and had drawn near.
“Trying to make a hole,” was the short reply.
“Do you think you will be able to?”
“No; but I am trying.”
In an agony of suspense Em waited. For ten minutes Lyndall pecked. The hole was three-eighths of an inch deep—then the blade sprung into ten pieces.
“What has happened now?” Em asked, blubbering afresh.
“Nothing,” said Lyndall. “Bring me my nightgown, a piece of paper, and the matches.”
Wondering, Em fumbled about till she found them.
“What are you going to do with them?” she whispered.
“Burn down the window.”
“But won’t the whole house take fire and burn down too?”
“Yes.”
“But will it not be very wicked?”
“Yes, very. And I do not care.”
She arranged the nightgown carefully in the corner of the window, with the chips of the frame about it. There was only one match in the box. She drew it carefully along the wall. For a moment it burnt up blue, and showed the tiny face with its glistening eyes. She held it carefully to the paper. For an instant it burnt up brightly, then flickered and went out. She blew the spark, but it died also. Then she threw the paper on to the ground, trod on it, and went to her bed, and began to undress.
Em rushed to the door, knocking against it wildly.
“Oh, Tant Sannie! Tant Sannie! Oh, let us out!” she cried. “Oh, Lyndall, what are we to do?”
Lyndall wiped a drop of blood off the lip she had bitten.
“I am going to sleep,” she said. “If you like to sit there and howl till the morning, do. Perhaps you will find that it helps; I never heard that howling helped any one.”
Long after, when Em herself had gone to bed and was almost asleep, Lyndall came and stood at her bedside.
“Here,” she said, slipping a little pot of powder into her hand; “rub some on to your face. Does it not burn where she struck you?”
Then she crept back to her own bed. Long, long after, when Em was really asleep, she lay still awake, and folded her hands on her little breast, and muttered—
“When that day comes, and I am strong, I will hate everything that has power, and help everything that is weak.” And she bit her lip again.
The German looked out at the cabin door for the last time that night. Then he paced the room slowly and sighed. Then he drew out pen and paper, and sat down to write, rubbing his old grey eyes with his knuckles before he began.
“My Chickens: You did not come to say good-bye to the old man. Might you? Ah, well, there is a land where they part no more, where saints immortal reign.
“I sit here alone, and I think of you. Will you forget the old man? When you wake tomorrow he will be far away. The old horse is lazy, but he has his stick to help him; that is three legs. He comes back one day with gold and diamonds. Will you welcome him? Well, we shall see. I go to meet Waldo. He comes back with the wagon; then he follows me. Poor boy? God knows. There is a land where all things are made right, but that land is not here.
“My little children, serve the Saviour; give your hearts to Him while you are yet young. Life is short.
“Nothing is mine, otherwise I would say, Lyndall, take my books, Em my stones. Now I say nothing. The things are mine: it is not righteous, God knows? But I am silent. Let it be. But I feel it, I must say I feel it.
“Do not cry too much for the old man. He goes out to seek his fortune, and comes back with it in a bag, it may be.
“I love my children. Do they think of me? I am Old Otto, who goes out to seek his fortune.
“O.F.”
Having concluded this quaint production, he put it where the children would find it the next morning, and proceeded to prepare his bundle. He never thought of entering a protest against the loss of his goods; like a child, he submitted, and wept. He had been there eleven years, and it was hard to go away. He spread open on the bed a blue handkerchief, and on it put one by one the things he thought most necessary and important—a little bag of curious seeds, which he meant to plant some day, an old German hymn-book, three misshapen stones that he greatly valued, a Bible, a shirt and two handkerchiefs; then there was room for nothing more. He tied up the bundle tightly and put it on a chair by his bedside.
“That is not much; they cannot say I take much,” he said, looking at it.
He put his knotted stick beside it, his blue tobacco bag and his short pipe, and then inspected his coats. He had two left—a moth-eaten overcoat and a black alpaca, out at the elbows. He decided for the overcoat; it was warm, certainly, but then he could carry it over his arm and only put it on when he met some one along the road. It was more respectable than the black alpaca.
He hung the greatcoat over the back of the chair, and stuffed a hard bit of roaster-cake under the knot of the bundle, and then his preparations were completed. The German stood contemplating them with much satisfaction. He had almost forgotten his sorrow at leaving in his pleasure at preparing. Suddenly he started; an expression of intense pain passed over his face. He drew back his left arm quickly, and then pressed his right hand upon his breast.
“Ah, the sudden pang again,” he said.
His face was white, but it quickly regained its colour. Then the old man busied himself in putting everything right.
“I will leave it neat. They shall not say I did not leave it neat,” he said. Even the little bags of seeds on the mantelpiece he put in rows and dusted. Then he undressed and got into bed. Under his pillow was a little storybook. He drew it forth. To the old German a story was no story. Its events were as real and as important to himself as the matters of his own life.
He could not go away without knowing whether that wicked earl relented and whether the baron married Emilina. So he adjusted his spectacles and began to read. Occasionally, as his feelings became too strongly moved, he ejaculated: “Ah, I thought so! That was a rogue! I saw it before! I knew it from the beginning!” More than half an hour had passed when he looked up to the silver watch at the top of his bed.
“The march is long tomorrow; this will not do,” he said, taking off his spectacles and putting them carefully into the book to mark the place. “This will be good reading as I walk along tomorrow,” he added, as he stuffed the book into the pocket of the greatcoat; “very good reading.” He nodded his head and lay down. He thought a little of his own troubles, a good deal of the two little girls he was leaving, of the earl, of Emilina, of the baron; but he was soon asleep—sleeping as peacefully as a little child, upon whose innocent soul sorrow and care cannot rest.
It was very quiet in the room. The coals in the fireplace threw a dull red light across the floor upon the red lions on the quilt. Eleven o’clock came, and the room was very still.
One o’clock came. The glimmer had died out, though the ashes were still warm, and the room was very dark. The grey mouse, who had his hole under the toolbox, came out and sat on the sacks in the corner; then, growing bolder, the room was so dark, it climbed the chair at the bedside, nibbled at the roaster-cake, took one bite quickly at the candle, and then sat on his haunches listening. It heard the even breathing of the old man, and the steps of the hungry Kaffer dog going his last round in search of a bone or a skin that had been forgotten; and it heard the white hen call out as the wild cat ran away with one of her brood, and it heard the chicken cry. Then the grey mouse went back to its hole under the toolbox, and the room was quiet. And two o’clock came. By that time the night was grown dull and cloudy. The wild cat had gone to its home on the kopje; the Kaffer dog had found a bone, and lay gnawing it.
An intense quiet reigned everywhere. Only in her room the Boer-woman tossed her great arms in her sleep; for she dreamed that a dark shadow with outstretched wings fled slowly over her house, and she moaned and shivered. And the night was very still.
But, quiet as all places were, there was a quite peculiar quiet in the German’s room. Though you strained your ear most carefully you caught no sound of breathing.
He was not gone, for the old coat still hung on the chair—the coat that was to be put on when he met any one; and the bundle and stick were ready for tomorrow’s long march. The old German himself lay there, his wavy black hair just touched with grey thrown back upon the pillow. The old face was lying there alone in the dark, smiling like a little child’s—oh, so peacefully. There is a stranger whose coming, they say, is worse than all the ills of life, from whose presence we flee away trembling; but he comes very tenderly sometimes. And it seemed almost as though Death had known and loved the old man, so gently it touched him. And how could it deal hardly with him—the loving, simple, childlike old man?
So it smoothed out the wrinkles that were in the old forehead, and fixed the passing smile, and sealed the eyes that they might not weep again; and then the short sleep of time was melted into the long, long sleep of eternity.
“How has he grown so young in this one night?” they said when they found him in the morning.
Yes, dear old man; to such as you time brings no age. You die with the purity and innocence of your childhood upon you, though you die in your grey hairs.