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The Story of an African Farm

by Olive Schreiner · English · Gutenberg #1441 · 561,054 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Story of an African Farm

Author: Olive Schreiner


        
Release date: September 1, 1998 [eBook #1441]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1441

Credits: Produced by Sue Asscher, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM ***

THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM

by (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner




Preface.

I have to thank cordially the public and my critics for the reception
they have given this little book.

Dealing with a subject that is far removed from the round of English
daily life, it of necessity lacks the charm that hangs about the ideal
representation of familiar things, and its reception has therefore been
the more kindly.

A word of explanation is necessary. Two strangers appear on the scene,
and some have fancied that in the second they have again the first, who
returns in a new guise. Why this should be we cannot tell; unless there
is a feeling that a man should not appear upon the scene, and then
disappear, leaving behind him no more substantial trace than a mere
book; that he should return later on as husband or lover, to fill some
more important part than that of the mere stimulator of thought.

Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage
method. According to that each character is duly marshalled at first,
and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right
crises each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain
falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction
in this, and of completeness. But there is another method--the method of
the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange
coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other,
and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not
return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are
brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one
knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the
players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing. Life may be painted
according to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of
criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other.

It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would better have liked
the little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle
driven into inaccessible kranzes by Bushmen; “of encounters with
ravening lions, and hair-breadth escapes.” This could not be. Such works
are best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the
creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with any fact, may spread
their wings.

But, should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown,
he will find that the facts creep in upon him. Those brilliant phases
and shapes which the imagination sees in far-off lands are not for him
to portray. Sadly he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it
into the gray pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him.

R. Iron.

     “We must see the first images which the external world casts
     upon the dark mirror of his mind; or must hear the first
     words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand
     by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the
     prejudices, the habits, and the passions that will rule his
     life.  The entire man is, so to speak, to be found in the
     cradle of the child.”

     Alexis de Tocqueville.




Glossary.

Several Dutch and Colonial words occurring in this work, the subjoined
Glossary is given, explaining the principal.

  Alle wereld!--Gosh!
  Aasvogels--Vultures.
  Benauwdheid--Indigestion.
  Brakje--A little cur of low degree.
  Bultong--Dried meat.
  Coop--Hide and Seek.
  Inspan--To harness.
  Kapje--A sun-bonnet.
  Karoo--The wide sandy plains in some parts of South Africa.
  Karoo-bushes--The bushes that take the place of grass on these plains.
  Kartel--The wooden-bed fastened in an ox-wagon.
  Kloof--A ravine.
  Kopje--A small hillock, or “little head.”
   Kraal--The space surrounded by a stone wall or hedged with thorn branches,
  into which sheep or cattle are driven at night.
  Mealies--Indian corn.
  Meerkat--A small weazel-like animal.
  Meiboss--Preserved and dried apricots.
  Nachtmaal--The Lord’s Supper.
  Oom--Uncle.
  Outspan--To unharness, or a place in the field where one unharnesses.
  Pap--Porridge.
  Predikant--Parson.
  Riem--Leather rope.
  Sarsarties--Food.
  Sleg--Bad.
  Sloot--A dry watercourse.
  Spook--To haunt, a ghost.
  Stamp-block--A wooden block, hollowed out, in which mealies are placed to
  be pounded before being cooked.
  Stoep--Porch.
  Tant or Tante--Aunt.
  Upsitting--In Boer courtship the man and girl are supposed to sit up
  together the whole night.
  Veld--Open country.
  Velschoen--Shoes of undressed leather.
  Vrijer--Available man.




Contents.

Part I.

     Chapter 1.I.  Shadows From Child Life.

     Chapter 1.II.  Plans and Bushman Paintings.

     Chapter 1.III.  I Was A Stranger, and Ye Took Me In.

     Chapter 1.IV.  Blessed is He That Believeth.

     Chapter 1.V.  Sunday Services.

     Chapter 1.VI.  Bonaparte Blenkins Makes His Nest.

     Chapter 1.VII.  He Sets His Trap.

     Chapter 1.VIII.  He Catches the Old Bird.

     Chapter 1.IX.  He Sees A Ghost.

     Chapter 1.X.  He Shows His Teeth.

     Chapter 1.XI.  He Snaps.

     Chapter 1.XII.  He Bites.

     Chapter 1.XIII.  He Makes Love.


Part II.

     Chapter 2.I.  Times and Seasons.

     Chapter 2.II.  Waldo’s Stranger.

     Chapter 2.III.  Gregory Rose Finds His Affinity.

     Chapter 2.IV.  Lyndall.

     Chapter 2.V.  Tant Sannie Holds An Upsitting, and Gregory Writes A Letter.

     Chapter 2.VI.  A Boer-wedding.

     Chapter 2.VII.  Waldo Goes Out to Taste Life, and Em Stays At Home and
     Tastes It.

     Chapter 2.VIII.  The Kopje.

     Chapter 2.IX.  Lyndall’s Stranger.

     Chapter 2.X.  Gregory Rose Has An Idea.

     Chapter 2.XI.  An Unfinished Letter.

     Chapter 2.XII.  Gregory’s Womanhood.

     Chapter 2.XIII.  Dreams.

     Chapter 2.XIV.  Waldo Goes Out to Sit in the Sunshine.




THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM




Part I.




Chapter 1.I. Shadows From Child-Life.


The Watch.

The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the
wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted
karoo bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain,
the milk-bushes with their long finger-like leaves, all were touched by
a weird and an almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.

In one spot only was the solemn monotony of the plain broken. Near the
centre a small solitary kopje rose. Alone it lay there, a heap of round
ironstones piled one upon another, as over some giant’s grave. Here and
there a few tufts of grass or small succulent plants had sprung up among
its stones, and on the very summit a clump of prickly-pears lifted their
thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moonlight on their
broad fleshy leaves. At the foot of the kopje lay the homestead.
First, the stone-walled sheep kraals and Kaffer huts; beyond them the
dwelling-house--a square, red-brick building with thatched roof. Even on
its bare red walls, and the wooden ladder that led up to the loft, the
moonlight cast a kind of dreamy beauty, and quite etherealized the low
brick wall that ran before the house, and which inclosed a bare patch of
sand and two straggling sunflowers. On the zinc roof of the great open
wagon-house, on the roofs of the outbuildings that jutted from its side,
the moonlight glinted with a quite peculiar brightness, till it seemed
that every rib in the metal was of burnished silver.

Sleep ruled everywhere, and the homestead was not less quiet than the
solitary plain.

In the farmhouse, on her great wooden bedstead, Tant Sannie, the
Boer-woman, rolled heavily in her sleep.

She had gone to bed, as she always did, in her clothes, and the night
was warm and the room close, and she dreamed bad dreams. Not of the
ghosts and devils that so haunted her waking thoughts; not of her second
husband the consumptive Englishman, whose grave lay away beyond the
ostrich-camps, nor of her first, the young Boer; but only of the sheep’s
trotters she had eaten for supper that night. She dreamed that one stuck
fast in her throat, and she rolled her huge form from side to side, and
snorted horribly.

In the next room, where the maid had forgotten to close the shutter, the
white moonlight fell in in a flood, and made it light as day. There were
two small beds against the wall. In one lay a yellow-haired child, with
a low forehead and a face of freckles; but the loving moonlight hid
defects here as elsewhere, and showed only the innocent face of a child
in its first sweet sleep.

The figure in the companion bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for
it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover
on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs.
Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the moonlight that was
bathing her.

“Em!” she called to the sleeper in the other bed; but received no
answer. Then she drew the cover from the floor, turned her pillow, and
pulling the sheet over her head, went to sleep again.

Only in one of the outbuildings that jutted from the wagon-house there
was some one who was not asleep.

The room was dark; door and shutter were closed; not a ray of light
entered anywhere. The German overseer, to whom the room belonged, lay
sleeping soundly on his bed in the corner, his great arms folded, and
his bushy grey and black beard rising and falling on his breast. But one
in the room was not asleep. Two large eyes looked about in the darkness,
and two small hands were smoothing the patchwork quilt. The boy, who
slept on a box under the window, had just awakened from his first sleep.
He drew the quilt up to his chin, so that little peered above it but a
great head of silky black curls and the two black eyes. He stared
about in the darkness. Nothing was visible, not even the outline of one
worm-eaten rafter, nor of the deal table, on which lay the Bible from
which his father had read before they went to bed. No one could tell
where the toolbox was, and where the fireplace. There was something very
impressive to the child in the complete darkness.

At the head of his father’s bed hung a great silver hunting watch. It
ticked loudly. The boy listened to it, and began mechanically to count.
Tick--tick--one, two, three, four! He lost count presently, and only
listened. Tick--tick--tick--tick!

It never waited; it went on inexorably; and every time it ticked a man
died! He raised himself a little on his elbow and listened. He wished it
would leave off.

How many times had it ticked since he came to lie down? A thousand
times, a million times, perhaps.

He tried to count again, and sat up to listen better.

“Dying, dying, dying!” said the watch; “dying, dying, dying!”

He heard it distinctly. Where were they going to, all those people?

He lay down quickly, and pulled the cover up over his head: but
presently the silky curls reappeared.

“Dying, dying, dying!” said the watch; “dying, dying, dying!”

He thought of the words his father had read that evening--“For wide is
the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction and many
there be which go in thereat.”

“Many, many, many!” said the watch.

“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto
life, and few there be that find it.”

“Few, few, few!” said the watch.

The boy lay with his eyes wide open. He saw before him a long stream of
people, a great dark multitude, that moved in one direction; then they
came to the dark edge of the world and went over. He saw them passing
on before him, and there was nothing that could stop them. He thought of
how that stream had rolled on through all the long ages of the past--how
the old Greeks and Romans had gone over; the countless millions of China
and India, they were going over now. Since he had come to bed, how many
had gone!

And the watch said, “Eternity, eternity, eternity!”

“Stop them! stop them!” cried the child.

And all the while the watch kept ticking on; just like God’s will, that
never changes or alters, you may do what you please.

Great beads of perspiration stood on the boy’s forehead. He climbed out
of bed and lay with his face turned to the mud floor.

“Oh, God, God! save them!” he cried in agony. “Only some, only a few!
Only for each moment I am praying here one!” He folded his little hands
upon his head. “God! God! save them!”

He grovelled on the floor.

Oh, the long, long ages of the past, in which they had gone over! Oh,
the long, long future, in which they would pass away! Oh, God! the long,
long, long eternity, which has no end!

The child wept, and crept closer to the ground.

*****


The Sacrifice.

The farm by daylight was not as the farm by moonlight. The plain was a
weary flat of loose red sand, sparsely covered by dry karoo bushes,
that cracked beneath the tread like tinder, and showed the red earth
everywhere. Here and there a milk-bush lifted its pale-coloured rods,
and in every direction the ants and beetles ran about in the
blazing sand. The red walls of the farmhouse, the zinc roofs of the
outbuildings, the stone walls of the kraals, all reflected the fierce
sunlight, till the eye ached and blenched. No tree or shrub was to
be seen far or near. The two sunflowers that stood before the door,
out-stared by the sun, drooped their brazen faces to the sand; and the
little cicada-like insects cried aloud among the stones of the kopje.

The Boer-woman, seen by daylight, was even less lovely than when, in
bed, she rolled and dreamed. She sat on a chair in the great front room,
with her feet on a wooden stove, and wiped her flat face with the corner
of her apron, and drank coffee, and in Cape Dutch swore that the
beloved weather was damned. Less lovely, too, by daylight was the dead
Englishman’s child, her little stepdaughter, upon whose freckles and
low, wrinkled forehead the sunlight had no mercy.

“Lyndall,” the child said to her little orphan cousin, who sat with her
on the floor threading beads, “how is it your beads never fall off your
needle?”

“I try,” said the little one gravely, moistening her tiny finger. “That
is why.”

The overseer, seen by daylight, was a huge German, wearing a shabby
suit, and with a childish habit of rubbing his hands and nodding his
head prodigiously when pleased at anything. He stood out at the kraals
in the blazing sun, explaining to two Kaffer boys the approaching end
of the world. The boys, as they cut the cakes of dung, winked at each
other, and worked as slowly as they possibly could; but the German never
saw it.

Away, beyond the kopje, Waldo his son herded the ewes and lambs--a
small and dusty herd--powdered all over from head to foot with red sand,
wearing a ragged coat and shoes of undressed leather, through whose
holes the toes looked out. His hat was too large, and had sunk down to
his eyes, concealing completely the silky black curls. It was a curious
small figure. His flock gave him little trouble. It was too hot for them
to move far; they gathered round every little milk-bush, as though they
hoped to find shade, and stood there motionless in clumps. He himself
crept under a shelving rock that lay at the foot of the kopje, stretched
himself on his stomach, and waved his dilapidated little shoes in the
air.

Soon, from the blue bag where he kept his dinner, he produced a fragment
of slate, an arithmetic, and a pencil. Proceeding to put down a sum with
solemn and earnest demeanour, he began to add it up aloud: “Six and
two is eight--and four is twelve--and two is fourteen--and four
is eighteen.” Here he paused. “And four is eighteen--and--four--is,
eighteen.” The last was very much drawled. Slowly the pencil slipped
from his fingers, and the slate followed it into the sand. For a while
he lay motionless, then began muttering to himself, folded his little
arms, laid his head down upon them, and might have been asleep, but for
the muttering sound that from time to time proceeded from him. A curious
old ewe came to sniff at him; but it was long before he raised his head.
When he did, he looked at the far-off hills with his heavy eyes.

“Ye shall receive--ye shall receive--shall, shall, shall,” he muttered.

He sat up then. Slowly the dulness and heaviness melted from his face;
it became radiant. Midday had come now, and the sun’s rays were poured
down vertically; the earth throbbed before the eye.

The boy stood up quickly, and cleared a small space from the bushes
which covered it. Looking carefully, he found twelve small stones of
somewhat the same size; kneeling down, he arranged them carefully on the
cleared space in a square pile, in shape like an altar. Then he walked
to the bag where his dinner was kept; in it was a mutton chop and a
large slice of brown bread. The boy took them out and turned the bread
over in his hand, deeply considering it. Finally he threw it away and
walked to the altar with the meat, and laid it down on the stones. Close
by in the red sand he knelt down. Sure, never since the beginning of the
world was there so ragged and so small a priest. He took off his great
hat and placed it solemnly on the ground, then closed his eyes and
folded his hands. He prayed aloud:

“Oh, God, my Father, I have made Thee a sacrifice. I have only twopence,
so I cannot buy a lamb. If the lambs were mine, I would give Thee one;
but now I have only this meat; it is my dinner meat. Please, my Father,
send fire down from heaven to burn it. Thou hast said, Whosoever shall
say unto this mountain, Be thou cast into the sea, nothing doubting, it
shall be done. I ask for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

He knelt down with his face upon the ground, and he folded his hands
upon his curls. The fierce sun poured down its heat upon his head and
upon his altar. When he looked up he knew what he should see--the glory
of God! For fear his very heart stood still, his breath came heavily;
he was half suffocated. He dared not look up. Then at last he raised
himself. Above him was the quiet blue sky, about him the red earth;
there were the clumps of silent ewes and his altar--that was all.

He looked up--nothing broke the intense stillness of the blue overhead.
He looked round in astonishment, then he bowed again, and this time
longer than before.

When he raised himself the second time all was unaltered. Only the sun
had melted the fat of the little mutton chop, and it ran down upon the
stones.

Then, the third time he bowed himself. When at last he looked up, some
ants had come to the meat on the altar. He stood up and drove them away.
Then he put his hat on his hot curls, and sat in the shade. He clasped
his hands about his knees. He sat to watch what would come to pass. The
glory of the Lord God Almighty! He knew he should see it.

“My dear God is trying me,” he said; and he sat there through the fierce
heat of the afternoon. Still he watched and waited when the sun began to
slope, and when it neared the horizon and the sheep began to cast long
shadows across the karoo, he still sat there. He hoped when the first
rays touched the hills till the sun dipped behind them and was gone.
Then he called his ewes together, and broke down the altar, and threw
the meat far, far away into the field.

He walked home behind his flock. His heart was heavy. He reasoned so:
“God cannot lie. I had faith. No fire came. I am like Cain--I am not
His. He will not hear my prayer. God hates me.”

The boy’s heart was heavy. When he reached the kraal gate the two girls
met him.

“Come,” said the yellow-haired Em, “let us play coop. There is still
time before it gets quite dark. You, Waldo, go and hide on the kopje;
Lyndall and I will shut eyes here, and we will not look.”

The girls hid their faces in the stone wall of the sheep-kraal, and the
boy clambered half way up the kopje. He crouched down between two stones
and gave the call. Just then the milk-herd came walking out of the
cow-kraal with two pails. He was an ill-looking Kaffer.

“Ah!” thought the boy, “perhaps he will die tonight, and go to hell! I
must pray for him, I must pray!”

Then he thought--“Where am I going to?” and he prayed desperately.

“Ah! this is not right at all,” little Em said, peeping between the
stones, and finding him in a very curious posture. “What are you doing
Waldo? It is not the play, you know. You should run out when we come to
the white stone. Ah, you do not play nicely.”

“I--I will play nicely now,” said the boy, coming out and standing
sheepishly before them; “I--I only forgot; I will play now.”

“He has been to sleep,” said freckled Em.

“No,” said beautiful little Lyndall, looking curiously at him: “he has
been crying.”

She never made a mistake.

*****


The Confession.

One night, two years after, the boy sat alone on the kopje. He had crept
softly from his father’s room and come there. He often did, because,
when he prayed or cried aloud, his father might awake and hear him; and
none knew his great sorrow, and none knew his grief, but he himself, and
he buried them deep in his heart.

He turned up the brim of his great hat and looked at the moon, but
most at the leaves of the prickly pear that grew just before him. They
glinted, and glinted, and glinted, just like his own heart--cold, so
hard, and very wicked. His physical heart had pain also; it seemed full
of little bits of glass, that hurt. He had sat there for half an hour,
and he dared not go back to the close house.

He felt horribly lonely. There was not one thing so wicked as he in
all the world, and he knew it. He folded his arms and began to cry--not
aloud; he sobbed without making any sound, and his tears left scorched
marks where they fell. He could not pray; he had prayed night and day
for so many months; and tonight he could not pray. When he left off
crying, he held his aching head with his brown hands. If one might have
gone up to him and touched him kindly; poor, ugly little thing! Perhaps
his heart was almost broken.

With his swollen eyes he sat there on a flat stone at the very top of
the kopje; and the tree, with every one of its wicked leaves, blinked,
and blinked, and blinked at him. Presently he began to cry again, and
then stopped his crying to look at it. He was quiet for a long while,
then he knelt up slowly and bent forward. There was a secret he had
carried in his heart for a year. He had not dared to look at it; he had
not whispered it to himself, but for a year he had carried it. “I hate
God!” he said. The wind took the words and ran away with them, among the
stones, and through the leaves of the prickly pear. He thought it died
away half down the kopje. He had told it now!

“I love Jesus Christ, but I hate God.”

The wind carried away that sound as it had done the first. Then he got
up and buttoned his old coat about him. He knew he was certainly lost
now; he did not care. If half the world were to be lost, why not he
too? He would not pray for mercy any more. Better so--better to know
certainly. It was ended now. Better so.

He began scrambling down the sides of the kopje to go home.

Better so! But oh, the loneliness, the agonized pain! for that night,
and for nights on nights to come! The anguish that sleeps all day on the
heart like a heavy worm, and wakes up at night to feed!

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, “Now deal us your
hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we
suffered when we were children.”

The barb in the arrow of childhood’s suffering is this: its intense
loneliness, its intense agony.




Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.

At last came the year of the great drought, the year of
eighteen-sixty-two. From end to end of the land the earth cried for
water. Man and beast turned their eyes to the pitiless sky, that like
the roof of some brazen oven arched overhead. On the farm, day after
day, month after month, the water in the dams fell lower and lower; the
sheep died in the fields; the cattle, scarcely able to crawl, tottered
as they moved from spot to spot in search of food. Week after week,
month after month, the sun looked down from the cloudless sky, till the
karoo-bushes were leafless sticks, broken into the earth, and the earth
itself was naked and bare; and only the milk-bushes, like old hags,
pointed their shrivelled fingers heavenward, praying for the rain that
never came.

*****

It was on an afternoon of a long day in that thirsty summer, that on the
side of the kopje furthest from the homestead the two girls sat. They
were somewhat grown since the days when they played hide-and-seek there,
but they were mere children still.

Their dress was of dark, coarse stuff; their common blue pinafores
reached to their ankles, and on their feet they wore home-made
velschoen.

They sat under a shelving rock, on the surface of which were still
visible some old Bushman paintings, their red and black pigments having
been preserved through long years from wind and rain by the overhanging
ledge; grotesque oxen, elephants, rhinoceroses, and a one-horned beast,
such as no man ever has seen or ever shall.

The girls sat with their backs to the paintings. In their laps were a
few fern and ice-plant leaves, which by dint of much searching they had
gathered under the rocks.

Em took off her big brown kapje and began vigorously to fan her red face
with it; but her companion bent low over the leaves in her lap, and at
last took up an ice-plant leaf and fastened it on to the front of her
blue pinafore with a pin.

“Diamonds must look as these drops do,” she said, carefully bending over
the leaf, and crushing one crystal drop with her delicate little nail.
“When I,” she said, “am grown up, I shall wear real diamonds, exactly
like these in my hair.”

Her companion opened her eyes and wrinkled her low forehead.

“Where will you find them, Lyndall? The stones are only crystals that we
picked up yesterday. Old Otto says so.”

“And you think that I am going to stay here always?”

The lip trembled scornfully.

“Ah, no,” said her companion. “I suppose some day we shall go somewhere;
but now we are only twelve, and we cannot marry till we are seventeen.
Four years, five--that is a long time to wait. And we might not have
diamonds if we did marry.”

“And you think that I am going to stay here till then?”

“Well, where are you going?” asked her companion.

The girl crushed an ice-plant leaf between her fingers.

“Tant Sannie is a miserable old woman,” she said. “Your father married
her when he was dying, because he thought she would take better care of
the farm, and of us, than an English woman. He said we should be taught
and sent to school. Now she saves every farthing for herself, buys us
not even one old book. She does not ill-use us--why? Because she is
afraid of your father’s ghost. Only this morning she told her Hottentot
that she would have beaten you for breaking the plate, but that three
nights ago she heard a rustling and a grunting behind the pantry door,
and knew it was your father coming to spook her. She is a miserable old
woman,” said the girl, throwing the leaf from her; “but I intend to go
to school.”

“And if she won’t let you?”

“I shall make her.”

“How?”

The child took not the slightest notice of the last question, and folded
her small arms across her knees.

“But why do you want to go, Lyndall?”

“There is nothing helps in this world,” said the child slowly, “but to
be very wise, and to know everything--to be clever.”

“But I should not like to go to school!” persisted the small freckled
face.

“And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go;
you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but
I,” said Lyndall, “will have nothing. I must learn.”

“Oh, Lyndall! I will give you some of my sheep,” said Em, with a sudden
burst of pitying generosity.

“I do not want your sheep,” said the girl slowly; “I want things of my
own. When I am grown up,” she added, the flush on her delicate features
deepening at every word, “there will be nothing that I do not know. I
shall be rich, very rich; and I shall wear not only for best, but every
day, a pure white silk, and little rose-buds, like the lady in Tant
Sannie’s bedroom, and my petticoats will be embroidered, not only at the
bottom, but all through.”

The lady in Tant Sannie’s bedroom was a gorgeous creature from a
fashion-sheet, which the Boer-woman, somewhere obtaining, had pasted up
at the foot of her bed, to be profoundly admired by the children.

“It would be very nice,” said Em; but it seemed a dream of quite too
transcendent a glory ever to be realized.

At this instant there appeared at the foot of the kopje two figures--the
one, a dog, white and sleek, one yellow ear hanging down over his left
eye; the other, his master, a lad of fourteen, and no other than the boy
Waldo, grown into a heavy, slouching youth of fourteen. The dog mounted
the kopje quickly, his master followed slowly. He wore an aged jacket
much too large for him, and rolled up at the wrists, and, as of old, a
pair of dilapidated velschoens and a felt hat. He stood before the two
girls at last.

“What have you been doing today?” asked Lyndall, lifting her eyes to his
face.

“Looking after ewes and lambs below the dam. Here!” he said, holding out
his hand awkwardly, “I brought them for you.”

There were a few green blades of tender grass.

“Where did you find them?”

“On the dam wall.”

She fastened them beside the leaf on her blue pinafore.

“They look nice there,” said the boy, awkwardly rubbing his great hands
and watching her.

“Yes; but the pinafore spoils it all; it is not pretty.”

He looked at it closely.

“Yes, the squares are ugly; but it looks nice upon you--beautiful.”

He now stood silent before them, his great hands hanging loosely at
either side.

“Some one has come today,” he mumbled out suddenly, when the idea struck
him.

“Who?” asked both girls.

“An Englishman on foot.”

“What does he look like?” asked Em.

“I did not notice; but he has a very large nose,” said the boy slowly.
“He asked the way to the house.”

“Didn’t he tell you his name?”

“Yes--Bonaparte Blenkins.”

“Bonaparte!” said Em, “why that is like the reel Hottentot Hans plays on
the violin--

     ‘Bonaparte, Bonaparte, my wife is sick;
      In the middle of the week, but Sundays not,
      I give her rice and beans for soup’--

It is a funny name.”

“There was a living man called Bonaparte once,” said she of the great
eyes.

“Ah yes, I know,” said Em--“the poor prophet whom the lions ate. I am
always so sorry for him.”

Her companion cast a quiet glance upon her.

“He was the greatest man who ever lived,” she said, “the man I like
best.”

“And what did he do?” asked Em, conscious that she had made a mistake,
and that her prophet was not the man.

“He was one man, only one,” said her little companion slowly, “yet all
the people in the world feared him. He was not born great, he was common
as we are; yet he was master of the world at last. Once he was only a
little child, then he was a lieutenant, then he was a general, then he
was an emperor. When he said a thing to himself he never forgot it. He
waited, and waited and waited, and it came at last.”

“He must have been very happy,” said Em.

“I do not know,” said Lyndall; “but he had what he said he would have,
and that is better than being happy. He was their master, and all the
people were white with fear of him. They joined together to fight him.
He was one and they were many, and they got him down at last. They
were like the wild cats when their teeth are fast in a great dog, like
cowardly wild cats,” said the child, “they would not let him go. There
were many; he was only one. They sent him to an island on the sea, a
lonely island, and kept him there fast. He was one man, and they were
many, and they were terrified at him. It was glorious!” said the child.

“And what then?” said Em.

“Then he was alone there in that island with men to watch him always,”
 said her companion, slowly and quietly. “And in the long lonely nights
he used to lie awake and think of the things he had done in the old
days, and the things he would do if they let him go again. In the day
when he walked near the shore it seemed to him that the sea all around
him was a cold chain about his body pressing him to death.”

“And then?” said Em, much interested.

“He died there in that island; he never got away.”

“It is rather a nice story,” said Em; “but the end is sad.”

“It is a terrible, hateful ending,” said the little teller of the story,
leaning forward on her folded arms; “and the worst is, it is true. I
have noticed,” added the child very deliberately, “that it is only the
made-up stories that end nicely; the true ones all end so.”

As she spoke the boy’s dark, heavy eyes rested on her face.

“You have read it, have you not?”

He nodded. “Yes; but the Brown history tells only what he did, not what
he thought.”

“It was in the Brown history that I read of him,” said the girl; “but I
know what he thought. Books do not tell everything.”

“No,” said the boy, slowly drawing nearer to her and sitting down at her
feet. “What you want to know they never tell.”

Then the children fell into silence, till Doss, the dog, growing uneasy
at its long continuance, sniffed at one and the other, and his master
broke forth suddenly:

“If they could talk, if they could tell us now!” he said, moving his
hand out over the surrounding objects--“then we would know something.
This kopje, if it could tell us how it came here! The ‘Physical
Geography’ says,” he went on most rapidly and confusedly, “that what
were dry lands now were once lakes; and what I think is this--these low
hills were once the shores of a lake; this kopje is some of the stones
that were at the bottom, rolled together by the water. But there is
this--How did the water come to make one heap here alone, in the centre
of the plain?” It was a ponderous question; no one volunteered an
answer. “When I was little,” said the boy, “I always looked at it and
wondered, and I thought a great giant was buried under it. Now I know
the water must have done it; but how? It is very wonderful. Did one
little stone come first, and stop the others as they rolled?” said the
boy with earnestness, in a low voice, more as speaking to himself than
to them.

“Oh, Waldo, God put the little kopje here,” said Em with solemnity.

“But how did he put it here?”

“By wanting.”

“But how did the wanting bring it here?”

“Because it did.”

The last words were uttered with the air of one who produces a clinching
argument. What effect it had on the questioner was not evident, for he
made no reply, and turned away from her.

Drawing closer to Lyndall’s feet, he said after a while in a low voice:

“Lyndall, has it never seemed to you that the stones were talking with
you? Sometimes,” he added in a yet lower tone, “I lie under there with
my sheep, and it seems that the stones are really speaking--speaking of
the old things, of the time when the strange fishes and animals lived
that are turned into stone now, and the lakes were here; and then of the
time when the little Bushmen lived here, so small and so ugly, and used
to sleep in the wild dog holes, and in the sloots, and eat snakes, and
shot the bucks with their poisoned arrows. It was one of them, one
of these old wild Bushmen, that painted those,” said the boy, nodding
toward the pictures--“one who was different from the rest. He did not
know why, but he wanted to make something beautiful--he wanted to make
something, so he made these. He worked hard, very hard, to find the
juice to make the paint; and then he found this place where the rocks
hang over, and he painted them. To us they are only strange things, that
make us laugh; but to him they were very beautiful.”

The children had turned round and looked at the pictures.

“He used to kneel here naked, painting, painting, painting; and he
wondered at the things he made himself,” said the boy, rising and moving
his hand in deep excitement. “Now the Boers have shot them all, so that
we never see a little yellow face peeping out among the stones.” He
paused, a dreamy look coming over his face. “And the wild bucks have
gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and
only the stones will lie on here, looking at everything like they look
now. I know that it is I who am thinking,” the fellow added slowly, “but
it seems as though it were they who are talking. Has it never seemed so
to you, Lyndall?”

“No, it never seems so to me,” she answered.

The sun had dipped now below the hills, and the boy, suddenly
remembering the ewes and lambs, started to his feet.

“Let us also go to the house and see who has come,” said Em, as the boy
shuffled away to rejoin his flock, while Doss ran at his heels, snapping
at the ends of the torn trousers as they fluttered in the wind.




Chapter 1.III. I Was A Stranger, and Ye Took Me In.

As the two girls rounded the side of the kopje, an unusual scene
presented itself. A large group was gathered at the back door of the
homestead.

On the doorstep stood the Boer-woman, a hand on each hip, her face
red and fiery, her head nodding fiercely. At her feet sat the yellow
Hottentot maid, her satellite, and around stood the black Kaffer maids,
with blankets twisted round their half-naked figures. Two, who stamped
mealies in a wooden block, held the great stampers in their hands, and
stared stupidly at the object of attraction. It certainly was not to
look at the old German overseer, who stood in the centre of the group,
that they had all gathered together. His salt-and-pepper suit, grizzly
black beard, and grey eyes were as familiar to every one on the farm
as the red gables of the homestead itself; but beside him stood the
stranger, and on him all eyes were fixed. Ever and anon the newcomer
cast a glance over his pendulous red nose to the spot where the
Boer-woman stood, and smiled faintly.

“I’m not a child,” cried the Boer-woman, in low Cape Dutch, “and I
wasn’t born yesterday. No, by the Lord, no! You can’t take me in! My
mother didn’t wean me on Monday. One wink of my eye and I see the whole
thing. I’ll have no tramps sleeping on my farm,” cried Tant Sannie
blowing. “No, by the devil, no! not though he had sixty-times-six red
noses.”

There the German overseer mildly interposed that the man was not a
tramp, but a highly respectable individual, whose horse had died by an
accident three days before.

“Don’t tell me,” cried the Boer-woman; “the man isn’t born that can take
me in. If he’d had money, wouldn’t he have bought a horse? Men who walk
are thieves, liars, murderers, Rome’s priests, seducers! I see the devil
in his nose!” cried Tant Sannie shaking her fist at him; “and to come
walking into the house of this Boer’s child and shaking hands as though
he came on horseback! Oh, no, no!”

The stranger took off his hat, a tall, battered chimneypot, and
disclosed a bald head, at the back of which was a little fringe of
curled white hair, and he bowed to Tant Sannie.

“What does she remark, my friend?” he inquired, turning his
crosswise-looking eyes on the old German.

The German rubbed his old hands and hesitated.

“Ah--well--ah--the--Dutch--you know--do not like people who walk--in
this country--ah!”

“My dear friend,” said the stranger, laying his hand on the German’s
arm, “I should have bought myself another horse, but crossing, five days
ago, a full river, I lost my purse--a purse with five hundred pounds
in it. I spent five days on the bank of the river trying to find
it--couldn’t. Paid a Kaffer nine pounds to go in and look for it at the
risk of his life--couldn’t find it.”

The German would have translated this information, but the Boer-woman
gave no ear.

“No, no; he goes tonight. See how he looks at me--a poor unprotected
female! If he wrongs me, who is to do me right?” cried Tant Sannie.

“I think,” said the German in an undertone, “if you didn’t look at her
quite so much it might be advisable. She--ah--she--might--imagine that
you liked her too well,--in fact--ah--”

“Certainly, my dear friend, certainly,” said the stranger. “I shall not
look at her.”

Saying this, he turned his nose full upon a small Kaffer of two years
old. That small naked son of Ham became instantly so terrified that he
fled to his mother’s blanket for protection, howling horribly.

Upon this the newcomer fixed his eyes pensively on the stamp-block,
folding his hands on the head of his cane. His boots were broken, but he
still had the cane of a gentleman.

“You vagabonds se Engelschman!” said Tant Sannie, looking straight at
him.

This was a near approach to plain English; but the man contemplated the
block abstractedly, wholly unconscious that any antagonism was being
displayed toward him.

“You might not be a Scotchman or anything of that kind, might you?”
 suggested the German. “It is the English that she hates.”

“My dear friend,” said the stranger, “I am Irish every inch of
me--father Irish, mother Irish. I’ve not a drop of English blood in my
veins.”

“And you might not be married, might you?” persisted the German. “If you
had a wife and children, now? Dutch people do not like those who are not
married.”

“Ah,” said the stranger, looking tenderly at the block, “I have a dear
wife and three sweet little children--two lovely girls and a noble boy.”

This information having been conveyed to the Boer-woman, she, after some
further conversation, appeared slightly mollified; but remained firm to
her conviction that the man’s designs were evil.

“For, dear Lord!” she cried; “all Englishmen are ugly; but was there
ever such a red-rag-nosed thing with broken boots and crooked eyes
before? Take him to your room,” she cried to the German; “but all the
sin he does I lay at your door.”

The German having told him how matters were arranged, the stranger made
a profound bow to Tant Sannie and followed his host, who led the way to
his own little room.

“I thought she would come to her better self soon,” the German said
joyously. “Tant Sannie is not wholly bad, far from it, far.” Then seeing
his companion cast a furtive glance at him, which he mistook for one of
surprise, he added quickly, “Ah, yes, yes; we are all a primitive people
here--not very lofty. We deal not in titles. Every one is Tante and
Oom--aunt and uncle. This may be my room,” he said, opening the door.
“It is rough, the room is rough; not a palace--not quite. But it may be
better than the fields, a little better!” he said, glancing round at his
companion. “Come in, come in. There is something to eat--a mouthful: not
the fare of emperors or kings; but we do not starve, not yet,” he
said, rubbing his hands together and looking round with a pleased,
half-nervous smile on his old face.

“My friend, my dear friend,” said the stranger, seizing him by the hand,
“may the Lord bless you, the Lord bless and reward you--the God of the
fatherless and the stranger. But for you I would this night have slept
in the fields, with the dews of heaven upon my head.”

Late that evening Lyndall came down to the cabin with the German’s
rations. Through the tiny square window the light streamed forth, and
without knocking she raised the latch and entered. There was a fire
burning on the hearth, and it cast its ruddy glow over the little dingy
room, with its worm-eaten rafters and mud floor, and broken whitewashed
walls. A curious little place, filled with all manner of articles. Next
to the fire was a great toolbox; beyond that the little bookshelf with
its well-worn books; beyond that, in the corner, a heap of filled and
empty grain-bags. From the rafters hung down straps, riems, old boots,
bits of harness, and a string of onions. The bed was in another corner,
covered by a patchwork quilt of faded red lions, and divided from the
rest of the room by a blue curtain, now drawn back. On the mantelshelf
was an endless assortment of little bags and stones; and on the wall
hung a map of South Germany, with a red line drawn through it to show
where the German had wandered. This place was the one home the girls had
known for many a year. The house where Tant Sannie lived and ruled was
a place to sleep in, to eat in, not to be happy in. It was in vain she
told them they were grown too old to go there; every morning and evening
found them there. Were there not too many golden memories hanging about
the old place for them to leave it?

Long winter nights, when they had sat round the fire and roasted
potatoes, and asked riddles, and the old man had told of the little
German village, where, fifty years before, a little German boy had
played at snowballs, and had carried home the knitted stockings of a
little girl who afterward became Waldo’s mother; did they not seem to
see the German peasant girls walking about with their wooden shoes and
yellow, braided hair, and the little children eating their suppers out
of little wooden bowls when the good mothers called them in to have
their milk and potatoes?

And were there not yet better times than these? Moonlight nights, when
they romped about the door, with the old man, yet more a child than any
of them, and laughed, till the old roof of the wagon-house rang?

Or, best of all, were there not warm, dark, starlight nights, when they
sat together on the doorstep, holding each other’s hands, singing German
hymns, their voices rising clear in the still night air--till the German
would draw away his hand suddenly to wipe quickly a tear the children
must not see? Would they not sit looking up at the stars and talking of
them--of the dear Southern Cross, red, fiery Mars, Orion, with his belt,
and the Seven Mysterious Sisters--and fall to speculating over them?
How old are they? Who dwelt in them? And the old German would say
that perhaps the souls we loved lived in them; there, in that little
twinkling point was perhaps the little girl whose stockings he had
carried home; and the children would look up at it lovingly, and call it
“Uncle Otto’s star.” Then they would fall to deeper speculations--of
the times and seasons wherein the heavens shall be rolled together as
a scroll, and the stars shall fall as a fig-tree casteth her untimely
figs, and there shall be time no longer: “When the Son of man shall
come in His glory, and all His holy angels with Him.” In lower and lower
tones they would talk, till at last they fell into whispers; then they
would wish good night softly, and walk home hushed and quiet.

Tonight, when Lyndall looked in, Waldo sat before the fire watching a
pot which simmered there, with his slate and pencil in his hand; his
father sat at the table buried in the columns of a three-weeks-old
newspaper; and the stranger lay stretched on the bed in the corner,
fast asleep, his mouth open, his great limbs stretched out loosely,
betokening much weariness. The girl put the rations down upon the table,
snuffed the candle, and stood looking at the figure on the bed.

“Uncle Otto,” she said presently, laying her hand down on the newspaper,
and causing the old German to look up over his glasses, “how long did
that man say he had been walking?”

“Since this morning, poor fellow! A gentleman--not accustomed to
walking--horse died--poor fellow!” said the German, pushing out his lip
and glancing commiseratingly over his spectacles in the direction of
the bed where the stranger lay, with his flabby double chin, and broken
boots through which the flesh shone.

“And do you believe him, Uncle Otto?”

“Believe him? why of course I do. He himself told me the story three
times distinctly.”

“If,” said the girl slowly, “he had walked for only one day his boots
would not have looked so; and if--”

“If!” said the German starting up in his chair, irritated that any one
should doubt such irrefragable evidence--“if! Why, he told me himself!
Look how he lies there,” added the German pathetically, “worn out--poor
fellow! We have something for him though,” pointing with his forefinger
over his shoulder to the saucepan that stood on the fire. “We are not
cooks--not French cooks, not quite; but it’s drinkable, drinkable, I
think; better than nothing, I think,” he added, nodding his head in a
jocund manner that evinced his high estimation of the contents of
the saucepan and his profound satisfaction therein. “Bish! bish! my
chicken,” he said, as Lyndall tapped her little foot up and down upon
the floor. “Bish! bish! my chicken, you will wake him.”

He moved the candle so that his own head might intervene between it
and the sleeper’s face; and, smoothing his newspaper, he adjusted his
spectacles to read.

The child’s grey-black eyes rested on the figure on the bed, then turned
to the German, then rested on the figure again.

“I think he is a liar. Good night, Uncle Otto,” she said slowly, turning
to the door.

Long after she had gone the German folded his paper up methodically, and
put it in his pocket.

The stranger had not awakened to partake of the soup, and his son had
fallen asleep on the ground. Taking two white sheepskins from the heap
of sacks in the corner, the old man doubled them up, and lifting the
boy’s head gently from the slate on which it rested, placed the skins
beneath it.

“Poor lambie, poor lambie!” he said, tenderly patting the great rough
bear-like head; “tired is he!”

He threw an overcoat across the boy’s feet, and lifted the saucepan from
the fire. There was no place where the old man could comfortably lie
down himself, so he resumed his seat. Opening a much-worn Bible, he
began to read, and as he read pleasant thoughts and visions thronged on
him.

“I was a stranger, and ye took me in,” he read.

He turned again to the bed where the sleeper lay.

“I was a stranger.”

Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body
nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and
fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very
real to him. “Jesus, lover, and is it given to us, weak and sinful,
frail and erring, to serve Thee, to take Thee in!” he said softly, as he
rose from his seat. Full of joy, he began to pace the little room. Now
and again as he walked he sang the lines of a German hymn, or muttered
broken words of prayer. The little room was full of light. It appeared
to the German that Christ was very near him, and that at almost any
moment the thin mist of earthly darkness that clouded his human eyes
might be withdrawn, and that made manifest of which the friends at
Emmaus, beholding it, said, “It is the Lord!”

Again, and yet again, through the long hours of that night, as the
old man walked he looked up to the roof of his little room, with its
blackened rafters, and yet saw them not. His rough bearded face was
illuminated with a radiant gladness; and the night was not shorter to
the dreaming sleepers than to him whose waking dreams brought heaven
near.

So quickly the night fled, that he looked up with surprise when at four
o’clock the first grey streaks of summer dawn showed themselves through
the little window. Then the old man turned to rake together the few
coals that lay under the ashes, and his son, turning on the sheepskins,
muttered sleepily to know if it were time to rise.

“Lie still, lie still! I would only make a fire,” said the old man.

“Have you been up all night?” asked the boy.

“Yes; but it has been short, very short. Sleep again, my chicken; it is
yet early.”

And he went out to fetch more fuel.




Chapter 1.IV. Blessed is He That Believeth.

Bonaparte Blenkins sat on the side of the bed. He had wonderfully
revived since the day before, held his head high, talked in a full
sonorous voice, and ate greedily of all the viands offered him. At his
side was a basin of soup, from which he took a deep draught now and
again as he watched the fingers of the German, who sat on the mud floor
mending the bottom of a chair.

Presently he looked out, where, in the afternoon sunshine, a few
half-grown ostriches might be seen wandering listlessly about, and then
he looked in again at the little whitewashed room, and at Lyndall, who
sat in the doorway looking at a book. Then he raised his chin and tried
to adjust an imaginary shirt-collar. Finding none, he smoothed the
little grey fringe at the back of his head, and began:

“You are a student of history, I perceive, my friend, from the study
of these volumes that lie scattered about this apartment; this fact has
been made evident to me.”

“Well--a little--perhaps--it may be,” said the German meekly.

“Being a student of history then,” said Bonaparte, raising himself
loftily, “you will doubtless have heard of my great, of my celebrated
kinsman, Napoleon Bonaparte?”

“Yes, yes,” said the German, looking up.

“I, sir,” said Bonaparte, “was born at this hour, on an April afternoon,
three-and-fifty years ago. The nurse, sir--she was the same who attended
when the Duke of Sutherland was born--brought me to my mother. ‘There is
only one name for this child,’ she said: ‘he has the nose of his great
kinsman;’ and so Bonaparte Blenkins became my name--Bonaparte Blenkins.
Yes, sir,” said Bonaparte, “there is a stream on my maternal side that
connects me with a stream on his maternal side.”

The German made a sound of astonishment.

“The connection,” said Bonaparte, “is one which could not be easily
comprehended by one unaccustomed to the study of aristocratic pedigrees;
but the connection is close.”

“Is it possible!” said the German, pausing in his work with much
interest and astonishment. “Napoleon an Irishman!”

“Yes,” said Bonaparte, “on the mother’s side, and that is how we are
related. There wasn’t a man to beat him,” said Bonaparte, stretching
himself--“not a man except the Duke of Wellington. And it’s a strange
coincidence,” added Bonaparte, bending forward, “but he was a connection
of mine. His nephew, the Duke of Wellington’s nephew, married a cousin
of mine. She was a woman! See her at one of the court balls--amber
satin--daisies in her hair. Worth going a hundred miles to look at her!
Often seen her there myself, sir!”

The German moved the leather thongs in and out, and thought of the
strange vicissitudes of human life, which might bring the kinsman of
dukes and emperors to his humble room.

Bonaparte appeared lost among old memories.

“Ah, that Duke of Wellington’s nephew!” he broke forth suddenly; “many’s
the joke I’ve had with him. Often came to visit me at Bonaparte Hall.
Grand place I had then--park, conservatory, servants. He had only one
fault, that Duke of Wellington’s nephew,” said Bonaparte, observing that
the German was deeply interested in every word, “He was a coward--what
you might call a coward. You’ve never been in Russia, I suppose?” said
Bonaparte, fixing his crosswise looking eyes on the German’s face.

“No, no,” said the old man humbly. “France, England, Germany, a little
in this country; it is all I have travelled.”

“I, my friend,” said Bonaparte, “I have been in every country in the
world, and speak every civilised language, excepting only Dutch and
German. I wrote a book of my travels--noteworthy incidents. Publisher
got it--cheated me out of it. Great rascals those publishers! Upon
one occasion the Duke of Wellington’s nephew and I were travelling
in Russia. All of a sudden one of the horses dropped down dead as
a doornail. There we were--cold night--snow four feet thick--great
forest--one horse not being able to move the sledge--night coming
on--wolves.

“‘Spree!’ says the Duke of Wellington’s nephew.

“‘Spree, do you call it? says I. ‘Look out.’

“There, sticking out under a bush, was nothing less than the nose of a
bear. The Duke of Wellington’s nephew was up a tree like a shot; I stood
quietly on the ground, as cool as I am at this moment, loaded my gun,
and climbed up the tree. There was only one bough.

“‘Bon,’ said the Duke of Wellington’s nephew, ‘you’d better sit in
front.’

“‘All right,’ said I; ‘but keep your gun ready. There are more coming.’
He’d got his face buried in my back.

“‘How many are there?’ said he.

“‘Four,’ said I.

“‘How many are there now?’ said he.

“‘Eight,’ said I.

“‘How many are there now?’ said he.

“‘Ten,’ said I.

“‘Ten! ten!’ said he; and down goes his gun.

“‘Wallie,’ I said, ‘what have you done? We’re dead men now.’

“‘Bon, my old fellow,’ said he, ‘I couldn’t help it; my hands trembled
so!’

“‘Wall,’ I said, turning round and seizing his hand, ‘Wallie, my dear
lad, good-bye. I’m not afraid to die. My legs are long--they hang
down--the first bear that comes and I don’t hit him, off goes my foot.
When he takes it I shall give you my gun and go. You may yet be saved;
but tell, oh, tell Mary Ann that I thought of her, that I prayed for
her.’

“‘Good-bye, old fellow,’ said he.

“‘God bless you,’ said I.

“By this time the bears were sitting in a circle all around the tree.
Yes,” said Bonaparte impressively, fixing his eyes on the German, “a
regular, exact, circle. The marks of their tails were left in the snow,
and I measured it afterward; a drawing-master couldn’t have done it
better. It was that saved me. If they’d rushed on me at once, poor old
Bon would never have been here to tell this story. But they came on,
sir, systematically, one by one. All the rest sat on their tails and
waited. The first fellow came up, and I shot him; the second fellow--I
shot him; the third--I shot him. At last the tenth came; he was the
biggest of all--the leader, you may say.

“‘Wall,’ I said, ‘give me your hand. My fingers are stiff with the cold;
there is only one bullet left. I shall miss him. While he is eating me
you get down and take your gun; and live, dear friend, live to remember
the man who gave his life for you!’ By that time the bear was at me. I
felt his paw on my trousers.

“‘Oh, Bonnie! Bonnie!’ said the Duke of Wellington’s nephew. But I just
took my gun and put the muzzle to the bear’s ear--over he fell--dead!”

Bonaparte Blenkins waited to observe what effect his story had made.
Then he took out a dirty white handkerchief and stroked his forehead,
and more especially his eyes.

“It always affects me to relate that adventure,” he remarked, returning
the handkerchief to his pocket. “Ingratitude--base, vile ingratitude--is
recalled by it! That man, that man, who but for me would have perished
in the pathless wilds of Russia, that man in the hour of my adversity
forsook me.” The German looked up. “Yes,” said Bonaparte, “I had money,
I had lands; I said to my wife: ‘There is Africa, a struggling country;
they want capital; they want men of talent; they want men of ability to
open up that land. Let us go.’

“I bought eight thousand pounds’ worth of machinery--winnowing, plowing,
reaping machines; I loaded a ship with them. Next steamer I came
out--wife, children, all. Got to the Cape. Where is the ship with
the things? Lost--gone to the bottom! And the box with the money?
Lost--nothing saved!

“My wife wrote to the Duke of Wellington’s nephew; I didn’t wish her to;
she did it without my knowledge.

“What did the man whose life I saved do? Did he send me thirty thousand
pounds? say, ‘Bonaparte, my brother, here is a crumb?’ No; he sent me
nothing.

“My wife said, ‘Write.’ I said, ‘Mary Ann, NO. While these hands have
power to work, NO. While this frame has power to endure, NO. Never shall
it be said that Bonaparte Blenkins asked of any man.’”

The man’s noble independence touched the German.

“Your case is hard; yes, that is hard,” said the German, shaking his
head.

Bonaparte took another draught of the soup, leaned back against the
pillows, and sighed deeply.

“I think,” he said after a while, rousing himself, “I shall now wander
in the benign air, and taste the gentle cool of evening. The stiffness
hovers over me yet; exercise is beneficial.”

So saying, he adjusted his hat carefully on the bald crown of his head,
and moved to the door. After he had gone the German sighed again over
his work:

“Ah, Lord! So it is! Ah!”

He thought of the ingratitude of the world.

“Uncle Otto,” said the child in the doorway, “did you ever hear of ten
bears sitting on their tails in a circle?”

“Well, not of ten exactly: but bears do attack travellers every day. It
is nothing unheard of,” said the German. “A man of such courage, too!
Terrible experience that!”

“And how do we know that the story is true, Uncle Otto?”

The German’s ire was roused.

“That is what I do hate!” he cried. “Know that is true! How do you know
that anything is true? Because you are told so. If we begin to question
everything--proof, proof, proof, what will we have to believe left?
How do you know the angel opened the prison door for Peter, except that
Peter said so? How do you know that God talked to Moses, except that
Moses wrote it? That is what I hate!”

The girl knit her brows. Perhaps her thoughts made a longer journey than
the German dreamed of; for, mark you, the old dream little how their
words and lives are texts and studies to the generation that shall
succeed them. Not what we are taught, but what we see, makes us, and the
child gathers the food on which the adult feeds to the end.

When the German looked up next there was a look of supreme satisfaction
in the little mouth and the beautiful eyes.

“What dost see, chicken?” he asked.

The child said nothing, and an agonizing shriek was borne on the
afternoon breeze.

“Oh, God! my God! I am killed!” cried the voice of Bonaparte, as he,
with wide open mouth and shaking flesh, fell into the room, followed by
a half-grown ostrich, who put its head in at the door, opened its beak
at him, and went away.

“Shut the door! shut the door! As you value my life, shut the door!”
 cried Bonaparte, sinking into a chair, his face blue and white, with
a greenishness about the mouth. “Ah, my friend,” he said tremulously,
“eternity has looked me in the face! My life’s thread hung upon a cord!
The valley of the shadow of death!” said Bonaparte, seizing the German’s
arm.

“Dear, dear, dear!” said the German, who had closed the lower half of
the door, and stood much concerned beside the stranger, “you have had a
fright. I never knew so young a bird to chase before; but they will take
dislikes to certain people. I sent a boy away once because a bird would
chase him. Ah, dear, dear!”

“When I looked round,” said Bonaparte, “the red and yawning cavity was
above me, and the reprehensible paw raised to strike me. My nerves,”
 said Bonaparte, suddenly growing faint, “always delicate--highly
strung--are broken--broken! You could not give a little wine, a little
brandy my friend?”

The old German hurried away to the bookshelf, and took from behind
the books a small bottle, half of whose contents he poured into a cup.
Bonaparte drained it eagerly.

“How do you feel now?” asked the German, looking at him with much
sympathy.

“A little, slightly, better.”

The German went out to pick up the battered chimneypot which had fallen
before the door.

“I am sorry you got the fright. The birds are bad things till you know
them,” he said sympathetically, as he put the hat down.

“My friend,” said Bonaparte, holding out his hand, “I forgive you; do
not be disturbed. Whatever the consequences, I forgive you. I know, I
believe, it was with no ill-intent that you allowed me to go out. Give
me your hand. I have no ill-feeling; none!”

“You are very kind,” said the German, taking the extended hand, and
feeling suddenly convinced that he was receiving magnanimous forgiveness
for some great injury, “you are very kind.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Bonaparte.

He knocked out the crown of his caved-in old hat, placed it on the table
before him, leaned his elbows on the table and his face in his hands,
and contemplated it.

“Ah, my old friend,” he thus apostrophized the hat, “you have served me
long, you have served me faithfully, but the last day has come. Never
more shall you be borne upon the head of your master. Never more shall
you protect his brow from the burning rays of summer or the cutting
winds of winter. Henceforth bare-headed must your master go. Good-bye,
good-bye, old hat!”

At the end of this affecting appeal the German rose. He went to the
box at the foot of his bed; out of it he took a black hat, which had
evidently been seldom worn and carefully preserved.

“It’s not exactly what you may have been accustomed to,” he said
nervously, putting it down beside the battered chimneypot, “but it might
be of some use--a protection to the head, you know.”

“My friend,” said Bonaparte, “you are not following my advice; you are
allowing yourself to be reproached on my account. Do not make yourself
unhappy. No; I shall go bare-headed.”

“No, no, no!” cried the German energetically. “I have no use for the
hat, none at all. It is shut up in the box.”

“Then I will take it, my friend. It is a comfort to one’s own mind when
you have unintentionally injured any one to make reparation. I know the
feeling. The hat may not be of that refined cut of which the old one
was, but it will serve, yes, it will serve. Thank you,” said Bonaparte,
adjusting it on his head, and then replacing it on the table. “I shall
lie down now and take a little repose,” he added; “I much fear my
appetite for supper will be lost.”

“I hope not, I hope not,” said the German, reseating himself at his
work, and looking much concerned as Bonaparte stretched himself on the
bed and turned the end of the patchwork quilt over his feet.

“You must not think to make your departure, not for many days,” said the
German presently. “Tant Sannie gives her consent, and--”

“My friend,” said Bonaparte, closing his eyes sadly, “you are kind; but
were it not that tomorrow is the Sabbath, weak and trembling as I lie
here, I would proceed on my way. I must seek work; idleness but for a
day is painful. Work, labour--that is the secret of all true happiness!”

He doubled the pillar under his head, and watched how the German drew
the leather thongs in and out.

After a while Lyndall silently put her book on the shelf and went
home, and the German stood up and began to mix some water and meal for
roaster-cakes. As he stirred them with his hands he said:

“I make always a double supply on Saturday night; the hands are then
free as the thoughts for Sunday.”

“The blessed Sabbath!” said Bonaparte.

There was a pause. Bonaparte twisted his eyes without moving his head,
to see if supper were already on the fire.

“You must sorely miss the administration of the Lord’s word in this
desolate spot,” added Bonaparte. “Oh, how love I Thine house, and the
place where Thine honour dwelleth!”

“Well, we do; yes,” said the German; “but we do our best. We meet
together, and I--well, I say a few words, and perhaps they are not
wholly lost, not quite.”

“Strange coincidence,” said Bonaparte; “my plan always was the same.
Was in the Free State once--solitary farm--one neighbour. Every Sunday
I called together friend and neighbour, child and servant, and said,
‘Rejoice with me, that we may serve the Lord,’ and then I addressed
them. Ah, those were blessed times,” said Bonaparte; “would they might
return.”

The German stirred at the cakes, and stirred, and stirred, and stirred.
He could give the stranger his bed, and he could give the stranger his
hat, and he could give the stranger his brandy; but his Sunday service!

After a good while he said:

“I might speak to Tant Sannie; I might arrange; you might take the
service in my place, if it--”

“My friend,” said Bonaparte, “it would give me the profoundest felicity,
the most unbounded satisfaction; but in these worn-out habiliments, in
these deteriorated garments, it would not be possible, it would not be
fitting that I should officiate in service of One whom, for respect, we
shall not name. No, my friend, I will remain here; and, while you are
assembling yourselves together in the presence of the Lord, I, in my
solitude, will think of and pray for you. No; I will remain here!”

It was a touching picture--the solitary man there praying for them. The
German cleared his hands from the meal, and went to the chest from which
he had taken the black hat. After a little careful feeling about, he
produced a black cloth coat, trousers, and waistcoat, which he laid on
the table, smiling knowingly. They were of new shining cloth, worn twice
a year, when he went to the town to nachtmaal. He looked with great
pride at the coat as he unfolded it and held it up.

“It’s not the latest fashion, perhaps, not a West End cut, not exactly;
but it might do; it might serve at a push. Try it on, try it on!” he
said, his old grey eyes twinkling with pride.

Bonaparte stood up and tried on the coat. It fitted admirably; the
waistcoat could be made to button by ripping up the back, and the
trousers were perfect; but below were the ragged boots. The German was
not disconcerted. Going to the beam where a pair of top-boots hung,
he took them off, dusted them carefully, and put them down before
Bonaparte. The old eyes now fairly brimmed over with sparkling
enjoyment.

“I have only worn them once. They might serve; they might be endured.”

Bonaparte drew them on and stood upright, his head almost touching
the beams. The German looked at him with profound admiration. It was
wonderful what a difference feathers made in the bird.




Chapter 1.V. Sunday Services.

Service No. I.

The boy Waldo kissed the pages of his book and looked up. Far over the
flat lay the kopje, a mere speck; the sheep wandered quietly from bush
to bush; the stillness of the early Sunday rested everywhere, and the
air was fresh.

He looked down at his book. On its page a black insect crept. He lifted
it off with his finger. Then he leaned on his elbow, watching its
quivering antennae and strange movements, smiling.

“Even you,” he whispered, “shall not die. Even you He loves. Even you He
will fold in His arms when He takes everything and makes it perfect and
happy.”

When the thing had gone he smoothed the leaves of his Bible somewhat
caressingly. The leaves of that book had dropped blood for him once;
they had taken the brightness out of his childhood; from between them
had sprung the visions that had clung about him and made night horrible.
Adder-like thoughts had lifted their heads, had shot out forked tongues
at him, asking mockingly strange, trivial questions that he could not
answer, miserable child:

Why did the women in Mark see only one angel and the women in Luke two?
Could a story be told in opposite ways and both ways be true? Could it?
could it? Then again: Is there nothing always right, and nothing always
wrong? Could Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite “put her hand to the
nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer?” and could the Spirit
of the Lord chant paeans over her, loud paeans, high paeans, set in the
book of the Lord, and no voice cry out it was a mean and dastardly sin
to lie, and kill the trusting in their sleep? Could the friend of God
marry his own sister, and be beloved, and the man who does it today goes
to hell, to hell? Was there nothing always right or always wrong?

Those leaves had dropped blood for him once: they had made his heart
heavy and cold; they had robbed his childhood of its gladness; now his
fingers moved over them caressingly.

“My father God knows, my father knows,” he said; “we cannot understand;
He knows.” After a while he whispered, smiling--“I heard your voice this
morning when my eyes were not yet open, I felt you near me, my Father.
Why do you love me so? His face was illuminated. In the last four
months the old question has gone from me. I know you are good; I know
you love everything; I know, I know, I know! I could not have borne it
any more, not any more.” He laughed softly. “And all the while I was so
miserable you were looking at me and loving me, and I never knew it.
But I know it now. I feel it,” said the boy, and he laughed low; “I feel
it!” he laughed.

After a while he began partly to sing, partly to chant the disconnected
verses of hymns, those which spoke his gladness, many times over. The
sheep with their senseless eyes turned to look at him as he sang.

At last he lapsed into quiet. Then as the boy lay there staring at bush
and sand, he saw a vision.

He had crossed the river of Death, and walked on the other bank in the
Lord’s land of Beulah. His feet sank into the dark grass, and he walked
alone. Then, far over the fields, he saw a figure coming across the dark
green grass. At first he thought it must be one of the angels; but as it
came nearer he began to feel what it was. And it came closer, closer to
him, and then the voice said, “Come,” and he knew surely Who it was. He
ran to the dear feet and touched them with his hands; yes, he held them
fast! He lay down beside them. When he looked up the face was over him,
and the glorious eyes were loving him; and they two were there alone
together.

He laughed a deep laugh; then started up like one suddenly awakened from
sleep.

“Oh, God!” He cried, “I cannot wait; I cannot wait! I want to die; I
want to see Him; I want to touch him. Let me die!” He folded his hands,
trembling. “How can I wait so long--for long, long years perhaps? I want
to die--to see Him. I will die any death. Oh, let me come!”

Weeping he bowed himself, and quivered from head to foot. After a long
while he lifted his head.

“Yes; I will wait; I will wait. But not long; do not let it be very
long, Jesus King. I want you; oh, I want you--soon, soon!” He sat still,
staring across the plain with his tearful eyes.

Service No. II.

In the front room of the farmhouse sat Tant Sannie in her elbow-chair.
In her hand was her great brass-clasped hymn-book, round her neck was a
clean white handkerchief, under her feet was a wooden stove. There too
sat Em and Lyndall, in clean pinafores and new shoes. There too was the
spruce Hottentot in a starched white kapje, and her husband on the other
side of the door, with his wool oiled and very much combed out, and
staring at his new leather boots. The Kaffer servants were not there
because Tant Sannie held they were descended from apes, and needed no
salvation. But the rest were gathered for the Sunday service, and waited
the officiator.

Meanwhile Bonaparte and the German approached arm in arm--Bonaparte
resplendent in the black cloth clothes, a spotless shirt, and a spotless
collar; the German in the old salt-and-pepper, casting shy glances of
admiration at his companion.

At the front door Bonaparte removed his hat with much dignity, raised
his shirt collar, and entered. To the centre table he walked, put his
hat solemnly down by the big Bible, and bowed his head over it in silent
prayer.

The Boer-woman looked at the Hottentot, and the Hottentot looked at the
Boer-woman.

There was one thing on earth for which Tant Sannie had a profound
reverence, which exercised a subduing influence over her, which made her
for the time a better woman--that thing was new, shining black cloth. It
made her think of the predikant; it made her think of the elders who sat
in the top pew of the church on Sundays, with the hair so nicely oiled,
so holy and respectable, with their little swallow-tailed coats; it made
her think of heaven, where everything was so holy and respectable, and
nobody wore tancord, and the littlest angel had a black-tailed coat. She
wished she hadn’t called him a thief and a Roman Catholic. She hoped the
German hadn’t told him. She wondered where those clothes were when he
came in rags to her door. There was no doubt, he was a very respectable
man, a gentleman.

The German began to read a hymn. At the end of each line Bonaparte
groaned, and twice at the end of every verse.

The Boer-woman had often heard of persons groaning during prayers, to
add a certain poignancy and finish to them; old Jan Vanderlinde, her
mother’s brother, always did it after he was converted; and she would
have looked upon it as no especial sign of grace in any one; but to
groan at hymn-time! She was startled. She wondered if he remembered that
she shook her fist in his face. This was a man of God. They knelt down
to pray. The Boer-woman weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and could
not kneel. She sat in her chair, and peeped between her crossed fingers
at the stranger’s back. She could not understand what he said; but he
was in earnest. He shook the chair by the back rail till it made quite a
little dust on the mud floor.

When they rose from their knees Bonaparte solemnly seated himself in
the chair and opened the Bible. He blew his nose, pulled up his shirt
collar, smoothed the leaves, stroked down his capacious waistcoat, blew
his nose again, looked solemnly round the room, then began.

“All liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and
brimstone, which is the second death.”

Having read this portion of Scripture, Bonaparte paused impressively,
and looked all round the room.

“I shall not, my dear friends,” he said, “long detain you. Much of
our precious time has already fled blissfully from us in the voice of
thanksgiving and the tongue of praise. A few, a very few words are all
I shall address to you, and may they be as a rod of iron dividing the
bones from the marrow, and the marrow from the bones.

“In the first place: What is a liar?”

The question was put so pointedly, and followed by a pause so profound,
that even the Hottentot man left off looking at his boots and opened his
eyes, though he understood not a word.

“I repeat,” said Bonaparte, “what is a liar?”

The sensation was intense; the attention of the audience was riveted.

“Have you any of you ever seen a liar, my dear friends?” There was a
still longer pause. “I hope not; I truly hope not. But I will tell you
what a liar is. I knew a liar once--a little boy who lived in Cape
Town, in Short Market Street. His mother and I sat together one day,
discoursing about our souls.

“‘Here, Sampson,’ said his mother, ‘go and buy sixpence of meiboss from
the Malay round the corner.’

“When he came back she said: ‘How much have you got?’

“‘Five,’ he said.

“He was afraid if he said six and a half she’d ask for some. And, my
friends, that was a lie. The half of a meiboss stuck in his throat and
he died and was buried. And where did the soul of that little liar go
to, my friends? It went to the lake of fire and brimstone. This brings
me to the second point of my discourse.

“What is a lake of fire and brimstone? I will tell you, my friends,”
 said Bonaparte condescendingly. “The imagination unaided cannot conceive
it: but by the help of the Lord I will put it before your mind’s eye.

“I was travelling in Italy once on a time; I came to a city called Rome,
a vast city, and near it is a mountain which spits forth fire. Its name
is Etna. Now, there was a man in that city of Rome who had not the fear
of God before his eyes, and he loved a woman. The woman died, and he
walked up that mountain spitting fire, and when he got to the top he
threw himself in at the hole that is there. The next day I went up.
I was not afraid; the Lord preserves His servants. And in their hands
shall they bear thee up, lest at any time thou fall into a volcano. It
was dark night when I got there, but in the fear of the Lord I walked to
the edge of the yawning abyss, and looked in. That sight--that sight, my
friends, is impressed upon my most indelible memory. I looked down into
the lurid depths upon an incandescent lake, a melted fire, a seething
sea; the billows rolled from side to side, and on their fiery crests
tossed the white skeleton of the suicide. The heat had burnt the flesh
from off the bones; they lay as a light cork upon the melted, fiery
waves. One skeleton hand was raised upward, the finger pointing to
heaven; the other, with outstretched finger, pointing downward, as
though it would say, ‘I go below, but you, Bonaparte, may soar above.’ I
gazed; I stood entranced. At that instant there was a crack in the lurid
lake; it swelled, expanded, and the skeleton of the suicide disappeared,
to be seen no more by mortal eye.”

Here again Bonaparte rested, and then continued:

“The lake of melted stone rose in the crater, it swelled higher and
higher at the side, it streamed forth at the top. I had presence of
mind; near me was a rock; I stood upon it. The fiery torrent was
vomited out and streamed on either side of me. And through that long and
terrible night I stood there alone upon that rock, the glowing,
fiery lava on every hand--a monument of the long-suffering and tender
providence of the Lord, who spared me that I might this day testify in
your ears of Him.

“Now, my dear friends, let us deduce the lessons that are to be learnt
from this narrative.

“Firstly: let us never commit suicide. The man is a fool, my friends,
that man is insane, my friends, who would leave this earth, my friends.
Here are joys innumerable, such as it hath not entered into the heart
of man to understand, my friends. Here are clothes, my friends; here
are beds, my friends; here is delicious food, my friends. Our precious
bodies were given us to love, to cherish. Oh, let us do so! Oh, let us
never hurt them; but care for and love them, my friends!”

Every one was impressed, and Bonaparte proceeded:

“Thirdly; let us not love too much. If that young man had not loved that
young woman, he would not have jumped into Mount Etna. The good men of
old never did so. Was Jeremiah ever in love, or Ezekiel, or Hosea, or
even any of the minor prophets? No. Then why should we be? Thousands
are rolling in that lake at this moment who would say, ‘It was love that
brought us here.’ Oh, let us think always of our own souls first.

     “‘A charge to keep I have,
         A God to glorify;
       A never-dying soul to save,
         And fit it for the sky.’

“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.



Chapter 1.VI. Bonaparte Blenkins Makes His Nest.

“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.



Chapter 1.VII. He Sets His Trap.

“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!

     “‘Love so amazing, so divine,
       It fills my soul, my life, my all.’”

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!”



Chapter 1.VIII. He Catches the Old Bird.

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.



Chapter 1.IX. He Sees A Ghost.

Bonaparte stood on the ash-heap. He espied across the plain a moving
speck and he chucked his coat-tails up and down in expectancy of a
scene.

The wagon came on slowly. Waldo laid curled among the sacks at the
back of the wagon, the hand in his breast resting on the sheep-shearing
machine. It was finished now. The right thought had struck him the
day before as he sat, half asleep, watching the water go over the
mill-wheel. He muttered to himself with half-closed eyes:

“Tomorrow smooth the cogs--tighten the screws a little--show it to
them.” Then after a pause--“Over the whole world--the whole world--mine,
that I have made!” He pressed the little wheels and pulleys in his
pocket till they cracked. Presently his muttering became louder--“And
fifty pounds--a black hat for my dadda--for Lyndall a blue silk,
very light; and one purple like the earth-bells, and white shoes.” He
muttered on--“A box full, full of books. They shall tell me all, all,
all,” he added, moving his fingers desiringly: “why the crystals grow in
such beautiful shapes; why lightning runs to the iron; why black people
are black; why the sunlight makes things warm. I shall read, read,
read,” he muttered slowly. Then came over him suddenly what he called
“The presence of God”; a sense of a good, strong something folding him
round. He smiled through his half-shut eyes. “Ah, Father, my own Father,
it is so sweet to feel you, like the warm sunshine. The Bibles and books
cannot tell of you and all I feel you. They are mixed with men’s words;
but you--”

His muttering sank into inaudible confusion, till, opening his eyes
wide, it struck him that the brown plain he looked at was the old home
farm. For half an hour they had been riding in it, and he had not known
it. He roused the leader, who sat nodding on the front of the wagon
in the early morning sunlight. They were within half a mile of the
homestead. It seemed to him that he had been gone from them all a year.
He fancied he could see Lyndall standing on the brick wall to watch for
him; his father, passing from one house to the other, stopping to look.

He called aloud to the oxen. For each one at home he had brought
something. For his father a piece of tobacco, bought at the shop by the
mill; for Em a thimble; for Lyndall a beautiful flower dug out by
the roots, at a place where they had outspanned; for Tant Sannie a
handkerchief. When they drew near the house he threw the whip to
the Kaffer leader, and sprung from the side of the wagon to run on.
Bonaparte stopped him as he ran past the ash-heap.

“Good morning, my dear boy. Where are you running to so fast with your
rosy cheeks?”

The boy looked up at him, glad even to see Bonaparte.

“I am going to the cabin,” he said, out of breath.

“You won’t find them in just now--not your good old father,” said
Bonaparte.

“Where is he?” asked the lad.

“There, beyond the camps,” said Bonaparte, waving his hand oratorically
toward the stone-walled ostrich-camps.

“What is he doing there?” asked the boy.

Bonaparte patted him on the cheek kindly.

“We could not keep him any more, it was too hot. We’ve buried him,
my boy,” said Bonaparte, touching with his finger the boy’s cheek. “We
couldn’t keep him any more. He, he, he!” laughed Bonaparte, as the boy
fled away along the low stone wall, almost furtively, as one in fear.

*****

At five o’clock Bonaparte knelt before a box in the German’s room. He
was busily unpacking it.

It had been agreed upon between Tant Sannie and himself, that now the
German was gone he, Bonaparte, was to be no longer schoolmaster, but
overseer of the farm. In return for his past scholastic labours he had
expressed himself willing to take possession of the dead man’s goods
and room. Tant Sannie hardly liked the arrangement. She had a great
deal more respect for the German dead than the German living, and would
rather his goods had been allowed to descend peacefully to his son. For
she was a firm believer in the chinks in the world above, where not only
ears, but eyes might be applied to see how things went on in this world
below. She never felt sure how far the spirit-world might overlap this
world of sense, and, as a rule, prudently abstained from doing anything
which might offend unseen auditors. For this reason she abstained from
ill-using the dead Englishman’s daughter and niece, and for this reason
she would rather the boy had had his father’s goods. But it was hard to
refuse Bonaparte anything when she and he sat so happily together in the
evening drinking coffee, Bonaparte telling her in the broken Dutch he
was fast learning how he adored fat women, and what a splendid farmer he
was.

So at five o’clock on this afternoon Bonaparte knelt in the German’s
room.

“Somewhere, here it is,” he said, as he packed the old clothes carefully
out of the box, and, finding nothing, packed them in again. “Somewhere
in this room it is; and if it’s here Bonaparte finds it,” he repeated.
“You didn’t stay here all these years without making a little pile
somewhere, my lamb. You weren’t such a fool as you looked. Oh, no!” said
Bonaparte.

He now walked about the room, diving his fingers in everywhere: sticking
them into the great crevices in the wall and frightening out the
spiders; rapping them against the old plaster till it cracked and fell
in pieces; peering up the chimney, till the soot dropped on his bald
head and blackened it. He felt in little blue bags; he tried to raise
the hearth-stone; he shook each book, till the old leaves fell down in
showers on the floor.

It was getting dark, and Bonaparte stood with his finger on his nose
reflecting. Finally he walked to the door, behind which hung the
trousers and waistcoat the dead man had last worn. He had felt in them,
but hurriedly, just after the funeral the day before; he would examine
them again. Sticking his fingers into the waistcoat pockets, he found in
one corner a hole. Pressing his hand through it, between the lining and
the cloth, he presently came into contact with something. Bonaparte drew
it forth--a small, square parcel, sewed up in sail-cloth. He gazed at
it, squeezed it; it cracked, as though full of bank-notes. He put it
quickly into his own waistcoat pocket, and peeped over the half-door to
see if there was any one coming. There was nothing to be seen but the
last rays of yellow sunset light, painting the karoo bushes in the
plain, and shining on the ash-heap, where the fowls were pecking. He
turned and sat down on the nearest chair, and, taking out his pen-knife,
ripped the parcel open. The first thing that fell was a shower of yellow
faded papers. Bonaparte opened them carefully one by one, and smoothed
them out on his knee. There was something very valuable to be hidden so
carefully, though the German characters he could not decipher. When he
came to the last one, he felt there was something hard in it.

“You’ve got it, Bon, my boy! you’ve got it!” he cried, slapping his leg
hard. Edging nearer to the door, for the light was fading, he opened the
paper carefully. There was nothing inside but a plain gold wedding-ring.

“Better than nothing!” said Bonaparte, trying to put it on his little
finger, which, however, proved too fat.

He took it off and set it down on the table before him, and looked at it
with his crosswise eyes.

“When that auspicious hour, Sannie,” he said, “shall have arrived, when,
panting, I shall lead thee, lighted by Hymen’s torch, to the connubial
altar, then upon thy fair amaranthine finger, my joyous bride, shall
this ring repose.

     “Thy fair body, oh, my girl,
      Shall Bonaparte possess;
      His fingers in thy money-bags,
      He therein, too, shall mess.”

Having given utterance to this flood of poesy, he sat lost in joyous
reflection.

“He therein, too, shall mess,” he repeated meditatively.

At this instant, as Bonaparte swore, and swore truly to the end of his
life, a slow and distinct rap was given on the crown of his bald head.

Bonaparte started and looked up. No riem or strap, hung down from
the rafters above, and not a human creature was near the door. It
was growing dark; he did not like it. He began to fold up the papers
expeditiously. He stretched out his hand for the ring. The ring was
gone! Gone, although no human creature had entered the room; gone,
although no form had crossed the doorway. Gone!

He would not sleep there, that was certain.

He stuffed the papers into his pocket. As he did so, three slow and
distinct taps were given on the crown of his head. Bonaparte’s jaw fell:
each separate joint lost its power: he could not move; he dared not
rise; his tongue lay loose in his mouth.

“Take all, take all!” he gurgled in his throat. “I--I do not want them.
Take”--

Here a resolute tug at the grey curls at the back of his head caused him
to leap up, yelling wildly. Was he to sit still paralyzed, to be dragged
away bodily to the devil? With terrific shrieks he fled, casting no
glance behind.

*****

When the dew was falling, and the evening was dark, a small figure moved
toward the gate of the furthest ostrich-camp, driving a bird before it.
When the gate was opened and the bird driven in and the gate fastened,
it turned away, but then suddenly paused near the stone wall.

“Is that you, Waldo?” said Lyndall, hearing a sound.

The boy was sitting on the damp ground with his back to the wall. He
gave her no answer.

“Come,” she said, bending over him, “I have been looking for you all
day.”

He mumbled something.

“You have had nothing to eat. I have put some supper in your room. You
must come home with me, Waldo.”

She took his hand, and the boy rose slowly.

She made him take her arm, and twisted her small fingers among his.

“You must forget,” she whispered. “Since it happened I walk, I talk,
I never sit still. If we remember, we cannot bring back the dead.” She
knit her little fingers closer among his. “Forgetting is the best thing.
He did watch it coming,” she whispered presently. “That is the dreadful
thing, to see it coming!” She shuddered. “I want it to come so to me
too. Why do you think I was driving that bird?” she added quickly. “That
was Hans, the bird that hates Bonaparte. I let him out this afternoon; I
thought he would chase him and perhaps kill him.”

The boy showed no sign of interest.

“He did not catch him; but he put his head over the half-door of your
cabin and frightened him horribly. He was there, busy stealing your
things. Perhaps he will leave them alone now; but I wish the bird had
trodden on him.”

They said no more till they reached the door of the cabin.

“There is a candle and supper on the table. You must eat,” she said
authoritatively. “I cannot stay with you now, lest they find out about
the bird.”

He grasped her arm and brought his mouth close to her ear.

“There is no God!” he almost hissed; “no God; not anywhere!”

She started.

“Not anywhere!”

He ground it out between his teeth, and she felt his hot breath on her
cheek.

“Waldo, you are mad,” she said, drawing herself from him, instinctively.

He loosened his grasp and turned away from her also.

In truth, is it not life’s way? We fight our little battles alone; you
yours, I mine. We must not help or find help.

When your life is most real, to me you are mad; when your agony is
blackest, I look at you and wonder. Friendship is good, a strong stick;
but when the hour comes to lean hard, it gives. In the day of their
bitterest need all souls are alone.

Lyndall stood by him in the dark, pityingly, wonderingly. As he walked
to the door, she came after him.

“Eat your supper; it will do you good,” she said.

She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and then ran away.

In the front room the little woolly Kaffer girl was washing Tant
Sannie’s feet in a small tub, and Bonaparte, who sat on the wooden
sofa, was pulling off his shoes and stockings that his own feet might
be washed also. There were three candles burning in the room, and he and
Tant Sannie sat close together, with the lean Hottentot not far off; for
when ghosts are about much light is needed, there is great strength
in numbers. Bonaparte had completely recovered from the effects of his
fright in the afternoon, and the numerous doses of brandy that it had
been necessary to administer to him to effect his restoration had put
him into a singularly pleasant and amiable mood.

“That boy Waldo,” said Bonaparte, rubbing his toes, “took himself off
coolly this morning as soon as the wagon came, and has not done a stiver
of work all day. I’ll not have that kind of thing now I’m master of this
farm.”

The Hottentot maid translated.

“Ah, I expect he’s sorry that his father’s dead,” said Tant Sannie.
“It’s nature, you know. I cried the whole morning when my father died.
One can always get another husband, but one can’t get another father,”
 said Tant Sannie, casting a sidelong glance at Bonaparte.

Bonaparte expressed a wish to give Waldo his orders for the next day’s
work, and accordingly the little woolly-headed Kaffer was sent to
call him. After a considerable time the boy appeared, and stood in the
doorway.

If they had dressed him in one of the swallow-tailed coats, and oiled
his hair till the drops fell from it, and it lay as smooth as an elder’s
on sacrament Sunday, there would still have been something unanointed in
the aspect of the fellow. As it was, standing there in his strange old
costume, his head presenting much the appearance of having been deeply
rolled in sand, his eyelids swollen, the hair hanging over his
forehead, and a dogged sullenness on his features, he presented most the
appearance of an ill-conditioned young buffalo.

“Beloved Lord,” cried Tant Sannie, “how he looks! Come in, boy. Couldn’t
you come and say good-day to me? Don’t you want some supper?”

He said he wanted nothing, and turned his heavy eyes away from her.

“There’s a ghost been seen in your father’s room,” said Tant Sannie. “If
you’re afraid you can sleep in the kitchen.”

“I will sleep in our room,” said the boy slowly.

“Well, you can go now,” she said; “but be up early to take the sheep.
The herd--”

“Yes, be up early, my boy,” interrupted Bonaparte, smiling. “I am to
be master of this farm now; and we shall be good friends, I trust, very
good friends, if you try to do your duty, my dear boy.”

Waldo turned to go, and Bonaparte, looking benignly at the candle,
stretched out one unstockinged foot, over which Waldo, looking at
nothing in particular, fell with a heavy thud upon the floor.

“Dear me! I hope you are not hurt, my boy,” said Bonaparte. “You’ll have
many a harder thing than that though, before you’ve gone through life,”
 he added consolingly, as Waldo picked himself up.

The lean Hottentot laughed till the room rang again; and Tant Sannie
tittered till her sides ached.

When he had gone the little maid began to wash Bonaparte’s feet.

“Oh, Lord, beloved Lord, how he did fall! I can’t think of it,” cried
Tant Sannie, and she laughed again. “I always did know he was not right;
but this evening any one could see it,” she added, wiping the tears of
mirth from her face. “His eyes are as wild as if the devil was in them.
He never was like other children. The dear Lord knows, if he doesn’t
walk alone for hours talking to himself. If you sit in the room with
him you can see his lips moving the whole time; and if you talk to him
twenty times he doesn’t hear you. Daft-eyes; he’s as mad as mad can be.”

This repetition of the word mad conveyed meaning to Bonaparte’s mind. He
left off paddling his toes in the water.

“Mad, mad? I know that kind of mad,” said Bonaparte, “and I know the
thing to give for it. The front end of a little horsewhip, the tip! Nice
thing; takes it out,” said Bonaparte.

The Hottentot laughed, and translated.

“No more walking about and talking to themselves on this farm now,” said
Bonaparte; “no more minding of sheep and reading of books at the same
time. The point of a horsewhip is a little thing, but I think he’ll
have a taste of it before long.” Bonaparte rubbed his hands and looked
pleasantly across his nose; and then the three laughed together grimly.

And Waldo in his cabin crouched in the dark in a corner, with his knees
drawn up to his chin.



Chapter 1.X. He Shows His Teeth.

Doss sat among the karoo bushes, one yellow ear drawn over his wicked
little eye, ready to flap away any adventurous fly that might settle on
his nose. Around him in the morning sunlight fed the sheep; behind him
lay his master polishing his machine. He found much comfort in handling
it that morning. A dozen philosophical essays, or angelically atuned
songs for the consolation of the bereaved, could never have been to him
what that little sheep-shearing machine was that day.

After struggling to see the unseeable, growing drunk with the endeavour
to span the infinite, and writhing before the inscrutable mystery, it
is a renovating relief to turn to some simple, feelable, weighable
substance; to something which has a smell and a colour, which may be
handled and turned over this way and that. Whether there be or be not
a hereafter, whether there be any use in calling aloud to the Unseen
power, whether there be an Unseen power to call to, whatever be the true
nature of the “I” who call and of the objects around me, whatever be
our meaning, our internal essence, our cause (and in a certain order of
minds death and the agony of loss inevitably awaken the wild desire,
at other times smothered, to look into these things), whatever be the
nature of that which lies beyond the unbroken wall which the limits of
the human intellect build up on every hand, this thing is certain--a
knife will cut wood, and one cogged wheel will turn another. This is
sure.

Waldo found an immeasurable satisfaction in the handling of his machine;
but Doss winked and blinked, and thought it all frightfully monotonous
out there on the flat, and presently dropped asleep, sitting bolt
upright. Suddenly his eyes opened wide; something was coming from the
direction of the homestead. Winking his eyes and looking intently, he
perceived it was the grey mare. Now Doss had wondered much of late what
had become of her master. Seeing she carried some one on her back, he
now came to his own conclusion, and began to move his tail violently up
and down. Presently he pricked up one ear and let the other hang; his
tail became motionless, and the expression of his mouth was one of
decided disapproval bordering on scorn. He wrinkled his lips up on each
side into little lines.

The sand was soft, and the grey mare came on so noiselessly that the boy
heard nothing till Bonaparte dismounted. Then Doss got up and moved back
a step. He did not approve of Bonaparte’s appearance. His costume,
in truth, was of a unique kind. It was a combination of the town and
country. The tails of his black cloth coat were pinned up behind to keep
them from rubbing; he had on a pair of moleskin trousers and leather
gaiters, and in his hand he carried a little whip of rhinoceros hide.

Waldo started and looked up. Had there been a moment’s time he would
have dug a hole in the sand with his hands and buried his treasure. It
was only a toy of wood, but he loved it, as one of necessity loves what
has been born of him, whether of the flesh or spirit. When cold eyes
have looked at it, the feathers are rubbed off our butterfly’s wing
forever.

“What have you here, my lad?” said Bonaparte, standing by him, and
pointing with the end of his whip to the medley of wheels and hinges.

The boy muttered something inaudible, and half spread over the thing.

“But this seems to be a very ingenious little machine,” said Bonaparte,
seating himself on the antheap, and bending down over it with deep
interest. “What is it for, my lad?”

“Shearing sheep.”

“It is a very nice little machine,” said Bonaparte. “How does it work,
now? I have never seen anything so ingenious!”

There was never a parent who heard deception in the voice that praised
his child--his first-born. Here was one who liked the thing that had
been created in him. He forgot everything. He showed how the shears
would work with a little guidance, how the sheep would be held, and the
wool fall into the trough. A flush burst over his face as he spoke.

“I tell you what, my lad,” said Bonaparte emphatically, when the
explanation was finished, “we must get you a patent. Your fortune is
made. In three years’ time there’ll not be a farm in this colony where
it isn’t working. You’re a genius, that’s what you are!” said Bonaparte,
rising.

“If it were made larger,” said the boy, raising his eyes, “it would work
more smoothly. Do you think there would be any one in this colony would
be able to make it?”

“I’m sure they could,” said Bonaparte; “and if not, why I’ll do my best
for you. I’ll send it to England. It must be done somehow. How long have
you worked at it?”

“Nine months,” said the boy.

“Oh, it is such a nice little machine,” said Bonaparte, “one can’t help
feeling an interest in it. There is only one little improvement, one
very little improvement, I should like to make.”

Bonaparte put his foot on the machine and crushed it into the sand. The
boy looked up into his face.

“Looks better now,” said Bonaparte, “doesn’t it? If we can’t have it
made in England we’ll send it to America. Good-bye; ta-ta,” he added.
“You’re a great genius, a born genius, my dear boy, there’s no doubt
about it.”

He mounted the grey mare and rode off. The dog watched his retreat with
cynical satisfaction; but his master lay on the ground with his head on
his arms in the sand, and the little wheels and chips of wood lay on
the ground around him. The dog jumped on to his back and snapped at the
black curls, till, finding that no notice was taken, he walked off to
play with a black beetle. The beetle was hard at work trying to roll
home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning: but
Doss broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s hind legs, and then bit off
its head. And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived
and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.



Chapter 1.XI. He Snaps.

“I have found something in the loft,” said Em to Waldo, who was
listlessly piling cakes of fuel on the kraal wall, a week after. “It is
a box of books that belonged to my father. We thought Tant Sannie had
burnt them.”

The boy put down the cake he was raising and looked at her.

“I don’t think they are very nice, not stories,” she added, “but you can
go and take any you like.”

So saying, she took up the plate in which she had brought his breakfast,
and walked off to the house.

After that the boy worked quickly. The pile of fuel Bonaparte had
ordered him to pack was on the wall in half an hour. He then went to
throw salt on the skins laid out to dry. Finding the pot empty, he went
to the loft to refill it.

Bonaparte Blenkins, whose door opened at the foot of the ladder, saw the
boy go up, and stood in the doorway waiting for his return. He wanted
his boots blacked. Doss, finding he could not follow his master up the
round bars, sat patiently at the foot of the ladder. Presently he looked
up longingly, but no one appeared. Then Bonaparte looked up also, and
began to call; but there was no answer. What could the boy be doing? The
loft was an unknown land to Bonaparte. He had often wondered what was
up there; he liked to know what was in all locked-up places and
out-of-the-way corners, but he was afraid to climb the ladder. So
Bonaparte looked up, and in the name of all that was tantalizing,
questioned what the boy did up there. The loft was used only as a
lumber-room. What could the fellow find up there to keep him so long?

Could the Boer-woman have beheld Waldo at that instant, any lingering
doubt which might have remained in her mind as to the boy’s insanity
would instantly have vanished. For, having filled the salt-pot, he
proceeded to look for the box of books among the rubbish that filled the
loft. Under a pile of sacks he found it--a rough packing-case, nailed
up, but with one loose plank. He lifted that, and saw the even backs of
a row of books. He knelt down before the box, and ran his hand along its
rough edges, as if to assure himself of its existence. He stuck his hand
in among the books, and pulled out two. He felt them, thrust his fingers
in among the leaves, and crumpled them a little, as a lover feels the
hair of his mistress. The fellow gloated over his treasure. He had had
a dozen books in the course of his life; now here was a mine of them
opened at his feet. After a while he began to read the titles, and now
and again opened a book and read a sentence; but he was too excited to
catch the meanings distinctly. At last he came to a dull, brown volume.
He read the name, opened it in the centre, and where he opened began
to read. It was a chapter on property that he fell upon--Communism,
Fourierism, St. Simonism, in a work on Political Economy. He read down
one page and turned over to the next; he read down that without changing
his posture by an inch; he read the next, and the next, kneeling up all
the while with the book in his hand, and his lips parted.

All he read he did not fully understand; the thoughts were new to him;
but this was the fellow’s startled joy in the book--the thoughts were
his, they belonged to him. He had never thought them before, but they
were his.

He laughed silently and internally, with the still intensity of
triumphant joy.

So, then, all thinking creatures did not send up the one cry--“As thou,
dear Lord, has created things in the beginning, so are they now, so
ought they to be, so will they be, world without end; and it doesn’t
concern us what they are. Amen.” There were men to whom not only kopjes
and stones were calling out imperatively, “What are we, and how came
we here? Understand us, and know us;” but to whom even the old, old
relations between man and man, and the customs of the ages called, and
could not be made still and forgotten.

The boy’s heavy body quivered with excitement. So he was not alone, not
alone. He could not quite have told any one why he was so glad, and
this warmth had come to him. His cheeks were burning. No wonder that
Bonaparte called in vain, and Doss put his paws on the ladder, and
whined till three-quarters of an hour had passed. At last the boy put
the book in his breast and buttoned it tightly to him. He took up the
salt pot, and went to the top of the ladder. Bonaparte, with his hands
folded under his coat-tails, looked up when he appeared, and accosted
him.

“You’ve been rather a long time up there, my lad,” he said, as the
boy descended with a tremulous haste, most unlike his ordinary slow
movements. “You didn’t hear me calling, I suppose?”

Bonaparte whisked the tails of his coat up and down as he looked at him.
He, Bonaparte Blenkins, had eyes which were very far-seeing. He looked
at the pot. It was rather a small pot to have taken three-quarters of
an hour in the filling. He looked at the face. It was flushed. And yet,
Tant Sannie kept no wine--he had not been drinking; his eyes were
wide open and bright--he had not been sleeping; there was no girl up
there--he had not been making love. Bonaparte looked at him sagaciously.
What would account for the marvellous change in the boy coming down the
ladder from the boy going up the ladder? One thing there was. Did not
Tant Sannie keep in the loft bultongs, and nice smoked sausages? There
must be something nice to eat up there! Aha! that was it!

Bonaparte was so interested in carrying out this chain of inductive
reasoning that he quite forgot to have his boots blacked.

He watched the boy shuffle off with the salt-pot under his arm; then
he stood in his doorway and raised his eyes to the quiet blue sky, and
audibly propounded this riddle to himself:

“What is the connection between the naked back of a certain boy with a
greatcoat on and a salt-pot under his arm, and the tip of a horsewhip?
Answer: No connection at present, but there will be soon.”

Bonaparte was so pleased with this sally of his wit that he chuckled a
little and went to lie down on his bed.

There was bread-baking that afternoon, and there was a fire lighted
in the brick oven behind the house, and Tant Sannie had left the great
wooden-elbowed chair in which she passed her life, and waddled out to
look at it. Not far off was Waldo, who, having thrown a pail of food
into the pigsty, now leaned over the sod wall looking at the pigs. Half
of the sty was dry, but the lower half was a pool of mud, on the edge of
which the mother sow lay with closed eyes, her ten little ones sucking;
the father pig, knee-deep in the mud, stood running his snout into a
rotten pumpkin and wriggling his curled tail.

Waldo wondered dreamily as he stared why they were pleasant to look at.
Taken singly they were not beautiful; taken together they were. Was
it not because there was a certain harmony about them? The old sow was
suited to the little pigs, and the little pigs to their mother, the
old boar to the rotten pumpkin, and all to the mud. They suggested the
thought of nothing that should be added, of nothing that should be
taken away. And, he wondered on vaguely, was not that the secret of all
beauty, that you who look on-- So he stood dreaming, and leaned further
and further over the sod wall, and looked at the pigs.

All this time Bonaparte Blenkins was sloping down from the house in an
aimless sort of way; but he kept one eye fixed on the pigsty, and each
gyration brought him nearer to it. Waldo stood like a thing asleep when
Bonaparte came close up to him.

In old days, when a small boy, playing in an Irish street-gutter, he,
Bonaparte, had been familiarly known among his comrades under the title
of Tripping Ben; this, from the rare ease and dexterity with which,
by merely projecting his foot, he could precipitate any unfortunate
companion on to the crown of his head. Years had elapsed, and Tripping
Ben had become Bonaparte; but the old gift was in him still. He came
close to the pigsty. All the defunct memories of his boyhood returned on
him in a flood, as, with an adroit movement, he inserted his leg between
Waldo and the wall and sent him over into the pigsty.

The little pigs were startled at the strange intruder, and ran behind
their mother, who sniffed at him. Tant Sannie smote her hands together
and laughed; but Bonaparte was far from joining her. Lost in reverie, he
gazed at the distant horizon.

The sudden reversal of head and feet had thrown out the volume that
Waldo carried in his breast. Bonaparte picked it up and began to inspect
it, as the boy climbed slowly over the wall. He would have walked off
sullenly, but he wanted his book, and he waited until it should be given
him.

“Ha!” said Bonaparte, raising his eyes from the leaves of the book which
he was examining, “I hope your coat has not been injured; it is of an
elegant cut. An heirloom, I presume, from your paternal grandfather? It
looks nice now.”

“Oh, Lord! oh! Lord!” cried Tant Sannie, laughing and holding her sides;
“how the child looks--as though he thought the mud would never wash off.
Oh, Lord, I shall die! You, Bonaparte, are the funniest man I ever saw.”

Bonaparte Blenkins was now carefully inspecting the volume he had picked
up. Among the subjects on which the darkness of his understanding had
been enlightened during his youth, Political Economy had not been one.
He was not, therefore, very clear as to what the nature of the book
might be; and as the name of the writer, J.S. Mill, might, for anything
he knew to the contrary, have belonged to a venerable member of the
British and Foreign Bible Society, it by no means threw light upon the
question. He was not in any way sure that Political Economy had nothing
to do with the cheapest way of procuring clothing for the army and navy,
which would be certainly both a political and economical subject.

But Bonaparte soon came to a conclusion as to the nature of the book
and its contents, by the application of a simple rule now largely
acted upon, but which, becoming universal, would save much thought and
valuable time. It is of marvellous simplicity, of infinite utility, of
universal applicability. It may easily be committed to memory and runs
thus:

Whenever you come into contact with any book, person, or opinion of
which you absolutely comprehend nothing, declare that book, person or
opinion to be immoral. Bespatter it, vituperate against it, strongly
insist that any man or woman harbouring it is a fool or a knave, or
both. Carefully abstain from studying it. Do all that in you lies to
annihilate that book, person, or opinion.

Acting on this rule, so wide in its comprehensiveness, so beautifully
simple in its working, Bonaparte approached Tant Sannie with the book in
his hand. Waldo came a step nearer, eyeing it like a dog whose young has
fallen into evil hands.

“This book,” said Bonaparte, “is not a fit and proper study for a young
and immature mind.”

Tant Sannie did not understand a word, and said:

“What?”

“This book,” said Bonaparte, bringing down his finger with energy on the
cover, “this book is sleg, sleg, Davel, Davel!”

Tant Sannie perceived from the gravity of his countenance that it was no
laughing matter. From the words “sleg” and “Davel” she understood that
the book was evil, and had some connection with the prince who pulls the
wires of evil over the whole earth.

“Where did you get this book?” she asked, turning her twinkling little
eyes on Waldo. “I wish that my legs may be as thin as an Englishman’s if
it isn’t one of your father’s. He had more sins than all the Kaffers in
Kafferland, for all that he pretended to be so good all those years, and
to live without a wife because he was thinking of the one that was dead!
As though ten dead wives could make up for one fat one with arms and
legs!” cried Tant Sannie, snorting.

“It was not my father’s book,” said the boy savagely. “I got it from
your loft.”

“My loft! my book! How dare you?” cried Tant Sannie.

“It was Em’s father’s. She gave it me,” he muttered more sullenly.

“Give it here. What is the name of it? What is it about?” she asked,
putting her finger upon the title.

Bonaparte understood.

“Political Economy,” he said slowly.

“Dear Lord!” said Tant Sannie, “cannot one hear from the very sound
what an ungodly book it is! One can hardly say the name. Haven’t we got
curses enough on this farm?” cried Tant Sannie, eloquently; “my best
imported Merino ram dying of nobody knows what, and the short-horn cow
casting her two calves, and the sheep eaten up with the scab and the
drought? And is this a time to bring ungodly things about the place, to
call down the vengeance of Almighty God to punish us more? Didn’t the
minister tell me when I was confirmed not to read any book except my
Bible and hymn-book, that the devil was in all the rest? And I never
have read any other book,” said Tant Sannie with virtuous energy, “and I
never will!”

Waldo saw that the fate of his book was sealed, and turned sullenly on
his heel.

“So you will not stay to hear what I say!” cried Tant Sannie. “There,
take your Polity-gollity-gominy, your devil’s book!” she cried, flinging
the book at his head with much energy.

It merely touched his forehead on one side and fell to the ground.

“Go on,” she cried; “I know you are going to talk to yourself. People
who talk to themselves always talk to the devil. Go and tell him all
about it. Go, go! run!” cried Tant Sannie.

But the boy neither quickened nor slackened his pace, and passed
sullenly round the back of the wagon-house.

Books have been thrown at other heads before and since that summer
afternoon, by hands more white and delicate than those of the
Boer-woman; but whether the result of the process has been in any case
wholly satisfactory, may be questioned. We love that with a peculiar
tenderness, we treasure it with a peculiar care, it has for us quite
a fictitious value, for which we have suffered. If we may not carry it
anywhere else we will carry it in our hearts, and always to the end.

Bonaparte Blenkins went to pick up the volume, now loosened from its
cover, while Tant Sannie pushed the stumps of wood further into the
oven. Bonaparte came close to her, tapped the book knowingly, nodded,
and looked at the fire. Tant Sannie comprehended, and, taking the volume
from his hand, threw it into the back of the oven. It lay upon the heap
of coals, smoked, flared, and blazed, and the “Political Economy” was no
more--gone out of existence, like many another poor heretic of flesh and
blood.

Bonaparte grinned, and to watch the process brought his face so near
the oven door that the white hair on his eyebrows got singed. He then
inquired if there were any more in the loft.

Learning that there were, he made signs indicative of taking up armfuls
and flinging them into the fire. But Tant Sannie was dubious. The
deceased Englishman had left all his personal effects specially to his
child. It was all very well for Bonaparte to talk of burning the books.
He had had his hair spiritually pulled, and she had no wish to repeat
his experience.

She shook her head. Bonaparte was displeased. But then a happy thought
occurred to him. He suggested that the key of the loft should henceforth
be put into his own safe care and keeping--no one gaining possession of
it without his permission. To this Tant Sannie readily assented, and the
two walked lovingly to the house to look for it.



Chapter 1.XII. He Bites.

Bonaparte Blenkins was riding home on the grey mare. He had ridden out
that afternoon, partly for the benefit of his health, partly to
maintain his character as overseer of the farm. As he rode on slowly, he
thoughtfully touched the ears of the grey mare with his whip.

“No, Bon, my boy,” he addressed himself, “don’t propose! You can’t marry
for four years, on account of the will; then why propose? Wheedle her,
tweedle her, teedle her, but don’t let her make sure of you. When a
woman,” said Bonaparte, sagely resting his finger against the side of
his nose, “When a woman is sure of you she does what she likes with
you; but when she isn’t, you do what you like with her. And I--” said
Bonaparte.

Here he drew the horse up suddenly and looked. He was now close to the
house, and leaning over the pigsty wall, in company with Em, who was
showing her the pigs, was a strange female figure. It was the first
visitor that had appeared on the farm since his arrival, and he looked
at her with interest. She was a tall, pudgy girl of fifteen, weighing
a hundred and fifty pounds, with baggy pendulous cheeks and up-turned
nose. She strikingly resembled Tant Sannie, in form and feature, but
her sleepy good eyes lacked that twinkle that dwelt in the Boer-woman’s
small orbs. She was attired in a bright green print, wore brass rings in
her ears and glass beads round her neck, and was sucking the tip of her
large finger as she looked at the pigs.

“Who is it that has come?” asked Bonaparte, when he stood drinking his
coffee in the front room.

“Why, my niece, to be sure,” said Tant Sannie, the Hottentot maid
translating. “She’s the only daughter of my only brother Paul, and she’s
come to visit me. She’ll be a nice mouthful to the man that can get
her,” added Tant Sannie. “Her father’s got two thousand pounds in the
green wagon box under his bed, and a farm, and five thousand sheep,
and God Almighty knows how many goats and horses. They milk ten cows in
mid-winter, and the young men are after her like flies about a bowl of
milk. She says she means to get married in four months, but she doesn’t
yet know to whom. It was so with me when I was young,” said Tant Sannie.
“I’ve sat up with the young men four and five nights a week. And they
will come riding again, as soon as ever they know that the time’s up
that the Englishman made me agree not to marry in.”

The Boer-woman smirked complacently.

“Where are you going to?” asked Tant Sannie presently, seeing that
Bonaparte rose.

“Ha! I’m just going to the kraals; I’ll be in to supper,” said
Bonaparte.

Nevertheless, when he reached his own door he stopped and turned in
there. Soon after he stood before the little glass, arrayed in his best
white shirt with the little tucks, and shaving himself. He had on his
very best trousers, and had heavily oiled the little fringe at the
back of his head, which, however, refused to become darker. But what
distressed him most was his nose--it was very red. He rubbed his finger
and thumb on the wall, and put a little whitewash on it; but, finding
it rather made matters worse, he rubbed it off again. Then he looked
carefully into his own eyes. They certainly were a little pulled down at
the outer corners, which gave them the appearance of looking crosswise;
but then they were a nice blue. So he put on his best coat, took up his
stick, and went out to supper, feeling on the whole well satisfied.

“Aunt,” said Trana to Tant Sannie when that night they lay together in
the great wooden bed, “why does the Englishman sigh so when he looks at
me?”

“Ha!” said Tant Sannie, who was half asleep, but suddenly started, wide
awake. “It’s because he thinks you look like me. I tell you, Trana,”
 said Tant Sannie, “the man is mad with love of me. I told him the other
night I couldn’t marry till Em was sixteen, or I’d lose all the sheep
her father left me. And he talked about Jacob working seven years and
seven years again for his wife. And of course he meant me,” said Tant
Sannie pompously. “But he won’t get me so easily as he thinks; he’ll
have to ask more than once.”

“Oh!” said Trana, who was a lumpish girl and not much given to talking;
but presently she added, “Aunt, why does the Englishman always knock
against a person when he passes them?”

“That’s because you are always in the way,” said Tant Sannie.

“But, aunt,” said Trana, presently, “I think he is very ugly.”

“Phugh!” said Tant Sannie. “It’s only because we’re not accustomed to
such noses in this country. In his country he says all the people have
such noses, and the redder your nose is the higher you are. He’s of the
family of the Queen Victoria, you know,” said Tant Sannie, wakening up
with her subject; “and he doesn’t think anything of governors and church
elders and such people; they are nothing to him. When his aunt with
the dropsy dies he’ll have money enough to buy all the farms in this
district.”

“Oh!” said Trana. That certainly made a difference.

“Yes,” said Tant Sannie; “and he’s only forty-one, though you’d take him
to be sixty. And he told me last night the real reason of his baldness.”

Tant Sannie then proceeded to relate how, at eighteen years of age,
Bonaparte had courted a fair young lady. How a deadly rival, jealous
of his verdant locks, his golden flowing hair, had, with a damnable
and insinuating deception, made him a present of a pot of pomatum. How,
applying it in the evening, on rising in the morning he found his pillow
strewn with the golden locks, and, looking into the glass, beheld
the shining and smooth expanse which henceforth he must bear. The few
remaining hairs were turned to a silvery whiteness, and the young lady
married his rival.

“And,” said Tant Sannie solemnly, “if it had not been for the grace of
God, and reading of the psalms, he says he would have killed himself. He
says he could kill himself quite easily if he wants to marry a woman and
she won’t.”

“Alle wereld!” said Trana: and then they went to sleep.

Every one was lost in sleep soon; but from the window of the cabin the
light streamed forth. It came from a dung fire, over which Waldo sat
brooding. Hour after hour he sat there, now and again throwing a fresh
lump of fuel on to the fire, which burnt up bravely, and then sank into
a great bed of red coals, which reflected themselves in the boy’s eyes
as he sat there brooding, brooding, brooding. At last, when the fire was
blazing at its brightest, he rose suddenly and walked slowly to a beam
from which an ox riem hung. Loosening it, he ran a noose in one end and
then doubled it round his arm.

“Mine, mine! I have a right,” he muttered; and then something louder,
“if I fall and am killed, so much the better!”

He opened the door and went out into the starlight.

He walked with his eyes bent upon the ground, but overhead it was one of
those brilliant southern nights when every space so small that your hand
might cover it shows fifty cold white points, and the Milky-Way is a
belt of sharp frosted silver. He passed the door where Bonaparte lay
dreaming of Trana and her wealth, and he mounted the ladder steps. From
those he clambered with some difficulty on to the roof of the house. It
was of old rotten thatch with a ridge of white plaster, and it crumbled
away under his feet at every step. He trod as heavily as he could. So
much the better if he fell.

He knelt down when he got to the far gable, and began to fasten his riem
to the crumbling bricks. Below was the little window of the loft. With
one end of the riem tied round the gable, the other end round his waist,
how easy to slide down to it, and to open it, through one of the broken
panes, and to go in, and to fill his arms with books, and to clamber up
again! They had burnt one book--he would have twenty. Every man’s hand
was against his--his should be against every man’s. No one would help
him--he would help himself.

He lifted the black damp hair from his knit forehead, and looked round
to cool his hot face. Then he saw what a regal night it was. He knelt
silently and looked up. A thousand eyes were looking down at him, bright
and so cold. There was a laughing irony in them.

“So hot, so bitter, so angry? Poor little mortal?”

He was ashamed. He folded his arms, and sat on the ridge of the roof
looking up at them.

“So hot, so bitter, so angry?”

It was as though a cold hand had been laid upon his throbbing forehead,
and slowly they began to fade and grow dim. Tant Sannie and the burnt
book, Bonaparte and the broken machine, the box in the loft, he himself
sitting there--how small they all became! Even the grave over yonder.
Those stars that shone on up above so quietly, they had seen a thousand
such little existences fight just so fiercely, flare up just so brightly
and go out; and they, the old, old stars, shone on forever.

“So hot, so angry, poor little soul?” they said.

The riem slipped from his fingers; he sat with his arms folded, looking
up.

“We,” said the stars, “have seen the earth when it was young. We have
seen small things creep out upon its surface--small things that prayed
and loved and cried very loudly, and then crept under it again. But we,”
 said the stars, “are as old as the Unknown.”

He leaned his chin against the palm of his hand and looked up at them.
So long he sat there that bright stars set and new ones rose, and yet he
sat on.

Then at last he stood up, and began to loosen the riem from the gable.

What did it matter about the books? The lust and the desire for them had
died out. If they pleased to keep them from him they might. What matter?
it was a very little thing. Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let it be
as it would.

He twisted the riem round his arm and walked back along the ridge of the
house.

By this time Bonaparte Blenkins had finished his dream of Trana, and as
he turned himself round for a fresh doze he heard the steps descending
the ladder. His first impulse was to draw the blanket over his head and
his legs under him, and to shout; but recollecting that the door was
locked and the window carefully bolted, he allowed his head slowly to
crop out among the blankets, and listened intently. Whosoever it might
be, there was no danger of their getting at him; so he clambered out of
bed, and going on tiptoe to the door, applied his eye to the keyhole.
There was nothing to be seen; so walking to the window, he brought his
face as close to the glass as his nose would allow. There was a figure
just discernible. The lad was not trying to walk softly, and the heavy
shuffling of the well-known velschoens could be clearly heard through
the closed window as they crossed the stones in the yard. Bonaparte
listened till they had died away round the corner of the wagon-house;
and, feeling that his bare legs were getting cold, he jumped back into
bed again.

*****

“What do you keep up in your loft?” inquired Bonaparte of the Boer-woman
the next evening, pointing upwards and elucidating his meaning by the
addition of such Dutch words as he knew, for the lean Hottentot was gone
home.

“Dried skins,” said the Boer-woman, “and empty bottles, and boxes, and
sacks, and soap.”

“You don’t keep any of your provisions there--sugar, now?” said
Bonaparte, pointing to the sugar-basin and then up at the loft.

Tant Sannie shook her head.

“Only salt, and dried peaches.”

“Dried peaches! Eh?” said Bonaparte. “Shut the door, my dear child, shut
it tight,” he called out to Em, who stood in the dining room. Then
he leaned over the elbow of the sofa and brought his face as close as
possible to the Boer-woman’s, and made signs of eating. Then he said
something she did not comprehend; then said, “Waldo, Waldo, Waldo,”
 pointed up to the loft, and made signs of eating again.

Now an inkling of his meaning dawned on the Boer-woman’s mind. To make
it clearer, he moved his legs after the manner of one going up a ladder,
appeared to be opening a door, masticated vigorously, said, “Peaches,
peaches, peaches,” and appeared to be coming down the ladder.

It was now evident to Tant Sannie that Waldo had been in her loft and
eaten her peaches.

To exemplify his own share in the proceedings, Bonaparte lay down on the
sofa, and shutting his eyes tightly, said, “Night, night, night!” Then
he sat up wildly, appearing to be intently listening, mimicked with his
feet the coming down a ladder, and looked at Tant Sannie. This clearly
showed how, roused in the night, he had discovered the theft.

“He must have been a great fool to eat my peaches,” said Tant Sannie.
“They are full of mites as a sheepskin, and as hard as stones.”

Bonaparte, fumbling in his pocket, did not even hear her remark, and
took out from his coat-tail a little horsewhip, nicely rolled up.
Bonaparte winked at the little rhinoceros horsewhip, at the Boer-woman,
and then at the door.

“Shall we call him--Waldo, Waldo?” he said.

Tant Sannie nodded, and giggled. There was something so exceedingly
humorous in the idea that he was going to beat the boy, though for her
own part she did not see that the peaches were worth it. When the Kaffer
maid came with the wash-tub she was sent to summon Waldo; and Bonaparte
doubled up the little whip and put it in his pocket. Then he drew
himself up, and prepared to act his important part with becoming
gravity. Soon Waldo stood in the door, and took off his hat.

“Come in, come in, my lad,” said Bonaparte, “and shut the door behind.”

The boy came in and stood before them.

“You need not be so afraid, child,” said Tant Sannie. “I was a child
myself once. It’s no great harm if you have taken a few.”

Bonaparte perceived that her remark was not in keeping with the nature
of the proceedings, and of the little drama he intended to act. Pursing
out his lips, and waving his hand, he solemnly addressed the boy.

“Waldo, it grieves me beyond expression to have to summon you for so
painful a purpose; but it is at the imperative call of duty, which I
dare not evade. I do not state that frank and unreserved confession will
obviate the necessity of chastisement, which if requisite shall be fully
administered; but the nature of that chastisement may be mitigated
by free and humble confession. Waldo, answer me as you would your own
father, in whose place I now stand to you; have you, or have you not,
did you, or did you not, eat of the peaches in the loft?”

“Say you took them, boy, say you took them, then he won’t beat you
much,” said the Dutchwoman, good-naturedly, getting a little sorry for
him.

The boy raised his eyes slowly and fixed them vacantly upon her, then
suddenly his face grew dark with blood.

“So, you haven’t got anything to say to us, my lad?” said Bonaparte,
momentarily forgetting his dignity, and bending forward with a little
snarl. “But what I mean is just this, my lad--when it takes a boy
three-quarters of an hour to fill a salt-pot, and when at three o’clock
in the morning he goes knocking about the doors of a loft, it’s natural
to suppose there’s mischief in it. It’s certain there is mischief in it;
and where there’s mischief in, it must be taken out,” said Bonaparte,
grinning into the boy’s face. Then, feeling that he had fallen from that
high gravity which was as spice to the pudding, and the flavour of the
whole little tragedy, he drew himself up. “Waldo,” he said, “confess to
me instantly, and without reserve, that you ate the peaches.”

The boy’s face was white now. His eyes were on the ground, his hands
doggedly clasped before him.

“What, do you not intend to answer?”

The boy looked up at them once from under his bent eyebrows, and then
looked down again.

“The creature looks as if all the devils in hell were in it,” cried Tant
Sannie. “Say you took them, boy. Young things will be young things; I
was older than you when I used to eat bultong in my mother’s loft, and
get the little niggers whipped for it. Say you took them.”

But the boy said nothing.

“I think a little solitary confinement might perhaps be beneficial,”
 said Bonaparte. “It will enable you, Waldo, to reflect on the enormity
of the sin you have committed against our Father in heaven. And you may
also think of the submission you owe to those who are older and wiser
than you are, and whose duty it is to check and correct you.”

Saying this, Bonaparte stood up and took down the key of the fuel-house,
which hung on a nail against the wall.

“Walk on, my boy,” said Bonaparte, pointing to the door; and as he
followed him out he drew his mouth expressively on one side, and made
the lash of the little horsewhip stick out of his pocket and shake up
and down.

Tant Sannie felt half sorry for the lad; but she could not help
laughing, it was always so funny when one was going to have a whipping,
and it would do him good. Anyhow, he would forget all about it when the
places were healed. Had not she been beaten many times and been all the
better for it?

Bonaparte took up a lighted candle that had been left burning on the
kitchen table, and told the boy to walk before him. They went to the
fuel-house. It was a little stone erection that jutted out from the side
of the wagon-house. It was low and without a window, and the dried dung
was piled in one corner, and the coffee-mill stood in another, fastened
on the top of a short post about three feet high. Bonaparte took the
padlock off the rough door.

“Walk in, my lad,” he said.

Waldo obeyed sullenly; one place to him was much the same as another. He
had no objection to being locked up.

Bonaparte followed him in, and closed the door carefully. He put the
light down on the heap of dung in the corner, and quietly introduced his
hand under his coat-tails, and drew slowly from his pocket the end of a
rope, which he concealed behind him.

“I’m very sorry, exceedingly sorry, Waldo, my lad, that you should have
acted in this manner. It grieves me,” said Bonaparte.

He moved round toward the boy’s back. He hardly liked the look in the
fellow’s eyes, though he stood there motionless. If he should spring on
him!

So he drew the rope out very carefully, and shifted round to the wooden
post. There was a slipknot in one end of the rope, and a sudden movement
drew the boy’s hands to his back and passed it round them. It was an
instant’s work to drag it twice round the wooden post: then Bonaparte
was safe.

For a moment the boy struggled to free himself; then he knew that he was
powerless, and stood still.

“Horses that kick must have their legs tied,” said Bonaparte, as he
passed the other end of the rope round the boy’s knees. “And now, my
dear Waldo,” taking the whip out of his pocket, “I am going to beat
you.”

He paused for a moment. It was perfectly quiet; they could hear each
other’s breath.

“‘Chasten thy son while there is hope,’” said Bonaparte, “‘and let not
thy soul spare for his crying.’ Those are God’s words. I shall act as a
father to you, Waldo. I think we had better have your naked back.”

He took out his penknife, and slit the shirt down from the shoulder to
the waist.

“Now,” said Bonaparte, “I hope the Lord will bless and sanctify to you
what I am going to do to you.”

The first cut ran from the shoulder across the middle of the back; the
second fell exactly in the same place. A shudder passed through the
boy’s frame.

“Nice, eh?” said Bonaparte, peeping round into his face, speaking with a
lisp, as though to a very little child. “Nith, eh?”

But the eyes were black and lustreless, and seemed not to see him. When
he had given sixteen Bonaparte paused in his work to wipe a little drop
of blood from his whip.

“Cold, eh? What makes you shiver so? Perhaps you would like to pull up
your shirt? But I’ve not quite done yet.”

When he had finished he wiped the whip again, and put it back in his
pocket. He cut the rope through with his penknife, and then took up the
light.

“You don’t seem to have found your tongue yet. Forgotten how to cry?”
 said Bonaparte, patting him on the cheek.

The boy looked up at him--not sullenly, not angrily. There was a wild,
fitful terror in the eyes. Bonaparte made haste to go out and shut the
door, and leave him alone in the darkness. He himself was afraid of that
look.

*****

It was almost morning. Waldo lay with his face upon the ground at the
foot of the fuel-heap. There was a round hole near the top of the door,
where a knot of wood had fallen out, and a stream of grey light came in
through it.

Ah, it was going to end at last. Nothing lasts forever, not even the
night. How was it he had never thought of that before? For in all that
long dark night he had been very strong, had never been tired, never
felt pain, had run on and on, up and down, up and down; he had not
dared to stand still, and he had not known it would end. He had been so
strong, that when he struck his head with all his force upon the stone
wall it did not stun him nor pain him--only made him laugh. That was a
dreadful night.

When he clasped his hands frantically and prayed--“O God, my beautiful
God, my sweet God, once, only once, let me feel you near me tonight!”
 he could not feel him. He prayed aloud, very loud, and he got no answer;
when he listened it was all quite quiet--like when the priests of Baal
cried aloud to their god--“Oh, Baal, hear us! Oh, Baal, hear us! But
Baal was gone a-hunting.”

That was a long wild night, and wild thoughts came and went in it; but
they left their marks behind them forever: for, as years cannot pass
without leaving their traces behind them, neither can nights into which
are forced the thoughts and sufferings of years. And now the dawn was
coming, and at last he was very tired. He shivered and tried to draw the
shirt up over his shoulders. They were getting stiff. He had never known
they were cut in the night. He looked up at the white light that came
in through the hole at the top of the door and shuddered. Then he turned
his face back to the ground and slept again.

Some hours later Bonaparte came toward the fuel-house with a lump of
bread in his hand. He opened the door and peered in; then entered,
and touched the fellow with his boot. Seeing that he breathed heavily,
though he did not rouse, Bonaparte threw the bread down on the ground.
He was alive, that was one thing. He bent over him, and carefully
scratched open one of the cuts with the nail of his forefinger,
examining with much interest his last night’s work. He would have to
count his sheep himself that day; the boy was literally cut up. He
locked the door and went away again.

“Oh, Lyndall,” said Em, entering the dining room, and bathed in tears,
that afternoon, “I have been begging Bonaparte to let him out, and he
won’t.”

“The more you beg the more he will not,” said Lyndall.

She was cutting out aprons on the table.

“Oh, but it’s late, and I think they want to kill him,” said Em, weeping
bitterly; and finding that no more consolation was to be gained from her
cousin, she went off blubbering--“I wonder you can cut out aprons when
Waldo is shut up like that.”

For ten minutes after she was gone Lyndall worked on quietly; then she
folded up her stuff, rolled it tightly together, and stood before the
closed door of the sitting room with her hands closely clasped. A flush
rose to her face: she opened the door quickly, and walked in, went to
the nail on which the key of the fuel-room hung. Bonaparte and Tant
Sannie sat there and saw her.

“What do you want?” they asked together.

“This key,” she said, holding it up, and looking at them.

“Do you mean her to have it?” said Tant Sannie in Dutch.

“Why don’t you stop her?” asked Bonaparte in English.

“Why don’t you take it from her?” said Tant Sannie.

So they looked at each other, talking, while Lyndall walked to the
fuel-house with the key, her underlip bitten in.

“Waldo,” she said, as she helped him to stand up, and twisted his arm
about her waist to support him, “we will not be children always; we
shall have the power, too, some day.” She kissed his naked shoulder with
her soft little mouth. It was all the comfort her young soul could give
him.



Chapter 1.XIII. He Makes Love.

“Here,” said Tant Sannie to her Hottentot maid, “I have been in this
house four years, and never been up in the loft. Fatter women than I go
up ladders; I will go up today and see what it is like, and put it to
rights up there. You bring the little ladder and stand at the bottom.”

“There’s one would be sorry if you were to fall,” said the Hottentot
maid, leering at Bonaparte’s pipe, that lay on the table.

“Hold your tongue, jade,” said her mistress, trying to conceal a pleased
smile, “and go and fetch the ladder.”

There was a never-used trap-door at one end of the sitting room: this
the Hottentot maid pushed open, and setting the ladder against it, the
Boer-woman with some danger and difficulty climbed into the loft. Then
the Hottentot maid took the ladder away, as her husband was mending the
wagon-house, and needed it; but the trap-door was left open.

For a little while Tant Sannie poked about among the empty bottles and
skins, and looked at the bag of peaches that Waldo was supposed to have
liked so; then she sat down near the trap-door beside a barrel of salt
mutton. She found that the pieces of meat were much too large, and took
out her clasp-knife to divide them.

That was always the way when one left things to servants, she grumbled
to herself: but when once she was married to her husband Bonaparte it
would not matter whether a sheep spoiled or no--when once his rich aunt
with the dropsy was dead. She smiled as she dived her hand into the
pickle-water.

At that instant her niece entered the room below, closely followed by
Bonaparte, with his head on one side, smiling mawkishly. Had Tant Sannie
spoken at that moment the life of Bonaparte Blenkins would have run a
wholly different course; as it was, she remained silent, and neither
noticed the open trap-door above their heads.

“Sit there, my love,” said Bonaparte, motioning Trana into her aunt’s
elbow-chair, and drawing another close up in front of it, in which he
seated himself. “There, put your feet upon the stove too. Your aunt has
gone out somewhere. Long have I waited for this auspicious event!”

Trana, who understood not one word of English, sat down in the chair and
wondered if this was one of the strange customs of other lands, that an
old gentleman may bring his chair up to yours, and sit with his knees
touching you. She had been five days in Bonaparte’s company, and feared
the old man, and disliked his nose.

“How long have I desired this moment!” said Bonaparte. “But that aged
relative of thine is always casting her unhallowed shadow upon us. Look
into my eyes, Trana.”

Bonaparte knew that she comprehended not a syllable; but he understood
that it is the eye, the tone, the action, and not at all the rational
word, that touches the love-chords. He saw she changed colour.

“All night,” said Bonaparte, “I lie awake; I see naught but thy angelic
countenance. I open my arms to receive thee--where art thou, where? Thou
art not there!” said Bonaparte, suiting the action to the words, and
spreading out his arms and drawing them to his breast.

“Oh, please, I don’t understand,” said Trana, “I want to go away.”

“Yes, yes,” said Bonaparte, leaning back in his chair, to her
great relief, and pressing his hands on his heart, “since first thy
amethystine countenance was impressed here--what have I not suffered,
what have I not felt? Oh, the pangs unspoken, burning as an ardent coal
in a fiery and uncontaminated bosom!” said Bonaparte, bending forward
again.

“Dear Lord!” said Trana to herself, “how foolish I have been! The old
man has a pain in his stomach, and now, as my aunt is out, he has come
to me to help him.”

She smiled kindly at Bonaparte, and pushing past him, went to the
bedroom, quickly returning with a bottle of red drops in her hand.

“They are very good for benauwdheid; my mother always drinks them,” she
said, holding the bottle out.

The face in the trap-door was a fiery red. Like a tiger-cat ready to
spring. Tant Sannie crouched, with the shoulder of mutton in her hand.
Exactly beneath her stood Bonaparte. She rose and clasped with both arms
the barrel of salt meat.

“What, rose of the desert, nightingale of the colony, that with thine
amorous lay whilest the lonesome night!” cried Bonaparte, seizing the
hand that held the vonlicsense. “Nay, struggle not! Fly as a stricken
fawn into the arms that would embrace thee, thou--”

Here a stream of cold pickle-water, heavy with ribs and shoulders,
descending on his head abruptly terminated his speech. Half-blinded,
Bonaparte looked up through the drops that hung from his eyelids, and
saw the red face that looked down at him. With one wild cry he fled.
As he passed out at the front door a shoulder of mutton, well-directed,
struck the black coat in the small of the back.

“Bring the ladder! bring the ladder! I will go after him!” cried the
Boer-woman, as Bonaparte Blenkins wildly fled into the fields.

*****

Late in the evening of the same day Waldo knelt on the floor of his
cabin. He bathed the foot of his dog which had been pierced by a thorn.
The bruises on his own back had had five days to heal in, and, except
a little stiffness in his movements, there was nothing remarkable about
the boy.

The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark.
If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the
gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off, and looking
carefully, you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not
dead.

Waldo poured the warm milk over the little swollen foot; Doss lay very
quiet, with tears in his eyes. Then there was a tap at the door. In an
instant Doss looked wide awake, and winked the tears out from between
his little lids.

“Come in,” said Waldo, intent on his work; and slowly and cautiously the
door opened.

“Good evening, Waldo, my boy,” said Bonaparte Blenkins in a mild voice,
not venturing more than his nose within the door. “How are you this
evening?”

Doss growled and showed his little teeth, and tried to rise, but his paw
hurt him so he whined.

“I’m very tired, Waldo, my boy,” said Bonaparte plaintively.

Doss showed his little white teeth again. His master went on with his
work without looking round. There are some people at whose hands it is
best not to look. At last he said:

“Come in.”

Bonaparte stepped cautiously a little way into the room, and left the
door open behind him. He looked at the boy’s supper on the table.

“Waldo, I’ve had nothing to eat all day--I’m very hungry,” he said.

“Eat!” said Waldo after a moment, bending lower over his dog.

“You won’t go and tell her that I am here, will you, Waldo?” said
Bonaparte most uneasily. “You’ve heard how she used me, Waldo? I’ve been
badly treated; you’ll know yourself what it is some day when you can’t
carry on a little conversation with a lady without having salt meat and
pickle-water thrown at you. Waldo, look at me; do I look as a gentleman
should?”

But the boy neither looked up nor answered, and Bonaparte grew more
uneasy.

“You wouldn’t go and tell her that I am here, would you?” said
Bonaparte, whiningly. “There’s no knowing what she would do to me. I’ve
such trust in you, Waldo; I’ve always thought you such a promising lad,
though you mayn’t have known it, Waldo.”

“Eat,” said the boy, “I shall say nothing.”

Bonaparte, who knew the truth when another spoke it, closed the door,
carefully putting on the button. Then he looked to see that the curtain
of the window was closely pulled down, and seated himself at the table.
He was soon munching the cold meat and bread. Waldo knelt on the floor,
bathing the foot with hands which the dog licked lovingly. Once only he
glanced at the table, and turned away quickly.

“Ah, yes! I don’t wonder that you can’t look at me, Waldo,” said
Bonaparte; “my condition would touch any heart. You see, the water was
fatty, and that has made all the sand stick to me; and my hair,” said
Bonaparte, tenderly touching the little fringe at the back of his head,
“is all caked over like a little plank; you wouldn’t think it was hair
at all,” said Bonaparte, plaintively. “I had to creep all along the
stone walls for fear she’d see me, and with nothing on my head but a
red handkerchief, tied under my chin, Waldo; and to hide in a sloot the
whole day, with not a mouthful of food, Waldo. And she gave me such a
blow, just here,” said Bonaparte.

He had cleared the plate of the last morsel, when Waldo rose and walked
to the door.

“Oh, Waldo, my dear boy, you are not going to call her,” said Bonaparte,
rising anxiously.

“I am going to sleep in the wagon,” said the boy, opening the door.

“Oh, we can both sleep in this bed; there’s plenty of room. Do stay, my
boy, please.”

But Waldo stepped out.

“It was such a little whip, Waldo,” said Bonaparte, following him
deprecatingly. “I didn’t think it would hurt you so much. It was such a
little whip. I am sure you didn’t take the peaches. You aren’t going to
call her, Waldo, are you?”

But the boy walked off.

Bonaparte waited till his figure had passed round the front of the
wagon-house, and then slipped out. He hid himself round the corner, but
kept peeping out to see who was coming. He felt sure the boy was gone
to call Tant Sannie. His teeth chattered with inward cold as he looked
round into the darkness and thought of the snakes that might bite him,
and the dreadful things that might attack him, and the dead that might
arise out of their graves if he slept out in the field all night. But
more than an hour passed and no footstep approached.

Then Bonaparte made his way back to the cabin. He buttoned the door
and put the table against it and, giving the dog a kick to silence his
whining when the fo

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