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Jess

by H. Rider Haggard · English · Gutenberg #5898 · 617,262 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Jess

Author: H. Rider Haggard


        
Release date: April 22, 2006 [eBook #5898]
                Most recently updated: March 31, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5898

Credits: John Bickers; Dagny and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JESS ***




Jess

by H. Rider Haggard

First Published 1887.

TO MY WIFE


Contents.

 CHAPTER I. JOHN HAS AN ADVENTURE
 CHAPTER II. HOW THE SISTERS CAME TO MOOIFONTEIN
 CHAPTER III. MR. FRANK MULLER
 CHAPTER IV. BESSIE IS ASKED IN MARRIAGE
 CHAPTER V. DREAMS ARE FOOLISHNESS
 CHAPTER VI. THE STORM BREAKS
 CHAPTER VII. LOVE’S YOUNG DREAM
 CHAPTER VIII. JESS GOES TO PRETORIA
 CHAPTER IX. JANTJE’S STORY
 CHAPTER X. JOHN HAS AN ESCAPE
 CHAPTER XI. ON THE BRINK
 CHAPTER XII. OVER IT
 CHAPTER XIII. FRANK MULLER SHOWS HIS HAND
 CHAPTER XIV. JOHN TO THE RESCUE
 CHAPTER XV. A ROUGH JOURNEY
 CHAPTER XVI. PRETORIA
 CHAPTER XVII. THE TWELFTH OF FEBRUARY
 CHAPTER XVIII. AND AFTER
 CHAPTER XIX. HANS COETZEE COMES TO PRETORIA
 CHAPTER XX. THE GREAT MAN
 CHAPTER XXI. JESS GETS A PASS
 CHAPTER XXII. ON THE ROAD
 CHAPTER XXIII. IN THE DRIFT OF THE VAAL
 CHAPTER XXIV. THE SHADOW OF DEATH
 CHAPTER XXV. MEANWHILE
 CHAPTER XXVI. FRANK MULLER’S FAMILIAR
 CHAPTER XXVII. SILAS IS CONVINCED
 CHAPTER XXVIII. BESSIE IS PUT TO THE QUESTION
 CHAPTER XXIX. CONDEMNED TO DEATH
 CHAPTER XXX. “WE MUST PART, JOHN”
 CHAPTER XXXI. JESS FINDS A FRIEND
 CHAPTER XXXII. HE SHALL DIE
 CHAPTER XXXIII. VENGEANCE
 CHAPTER XXXIV. TANTA COETZEE TO THE RESCUE
 CHAPTER XXXV. THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER




JESS.




CHAPTER I.
JOHN HAS AN ADVENTURE


The day had been very hot even for the Transvaal, where the days still
know how to be hot in the autumn, although the neck of the summer is
broken—especially when the thunderstorms hold off for a week or two, as
they do occasionally. Even the succulent blue lilies—a variety of the
agapanthus which is so familiar to us in English greenhouses—hung their
long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed and miserable, beneath
the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for hours
like the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide roadway
that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across the veldt,
forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a lady’s arm, was
completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust. But the hot wind
was going down now, as it always does towards sunset. Indeed, all that
remained of it were a few strictly local and miniature whirlwinds,
which would suddenly spring up on the road itself, and twist and twirl
fiercely round, raising a mighty column of dust fifty feet or more into
the air, where it hung long after the wind had passed, and then slowly
dissolved as its particles floated to the earth.

Advancing along the road, in the immediate track of one of these
desultory and inexplicable whirlwinds, was a man on horseback. The man
looked limp and dirty, and the horse limper and dirtier. The hot wind
had “taken all the bones out of them,” as the Kafirs say, which was not
very much to be wondered at, seeing that they had been journeying
through it for the last four hours without off-saddling. Suddenly the
whirlwind, which had been travelling along smartly, halted, and the
dust, after revolving a few times in the air like a dying top, slowly
began to disperse in the accustomed fashion. The man on the horse
halted also, and contemplated it in an absent kind of way.

“It’s just like a man’s life,” he said aloud to his horse, “coming from
nobody knows where, nobody knows why, and making a little column of
dust on the world’s highway, then passing away, leaving the dust to
fall to the ground again, to be trodden under foot and forgotten.”

The speaker, a stout, well set-up, rather ugly man, apparently on the
wrong side of thirty, with pleasant blue eyes and a reddish peaked
beard, laughed a little at his own sententious reflection, and then
gave his jaded horse a tap with the _sjambock_ in his hand.

“Come on, Blesbok,” he said, “or we shall never get to old Croft’s
place to-night. By Jove! I believe that must be the turn,” and he
pointed with his whip to a little rutty track that branched from the
Wakkerstroom main road and stretched away towards a curious isolated
hill with a large flat top, which rose out of the rolling plain some
four miles to the right. “The old Boer said the second turn,” he went
on still talking to himself, “but perhaps he lied. I am told that some
of them think it is a good joke to send an Englishman a few miles
wrong. Let’s see, they told me the place was under the lee of a
table-topped hill, about half an hour’s ride from the main road, and
that is a table-topped hill, so I think I will try it. Come on,
Blesbok,” and he put the tired nag into a sort of “tripple,” or ambling
canter much affected by South African horses.

“Life is a queer thing,” reflected Captain John Niel to himself as he
cantered along slowly. “Now here am I, at the age of thirty-four, about
to begin the world again as assistant to an old Transvaal farmer. It is
a pretty end to all one’s ambitions, and to fourteen years’ work in the
army; but it is what it has come to, my boy, so you had better make the
best of it.”

Just then his cogitations were interrupted, for on the farther side of
a gentle slope suddenly there appeared an extraordinary sight. Over the
crest of the rise of land, now some four or five hundred yards away, a
pony with a lady on its back galloped wildly, and after it, with wings
spread and outstretched neck, a huge cock ostrich was speeding in
pursuit, covering twelve or fifteen feet at every stride of its long
legs. The pony was still twenty yards ahead of the bird, and travelling
towards John rapidly, but strive as it would it could not distance the
swiftest thing on all the earth. Five seconds passed—the great bird was
close alongside now—Ah! and John Niel turned sick and shut his eyes as
he rode, for he saw the ostrich’s thick leg fly high into the air and
then sweep down like a leaded bludgeon!

_Thud!_ It had missed the lady and struck her horse upon the spine,
just behind the saddle, for the moment completely paralysing it so that
it fell all of a heap on to the veldt. In a moment the girl on its back
was up and running towards him, and after her came the ostrich. Up went
the great leg again, but before it could come crashing across her
shoulders she had flung herself face downwards on the grass. In an
instant the huge bird was on the top of her, kicking at her, rolling
over her, and crushing the very life out of her. It was at this
juncture that John Niel arrived upon the scene. The moment the ostrich
saw him it gave up its attacks upon the lady on the ground and began to
waltz towards him with the pompous sort of step that these birds
sometimes assume before they give battle. Now Captain Niel was
unaccustomed to the pleasant ways of ostriches, and so was his horse,
which showed a strong inclination to bolt; as, indeed, under other
circumstances, his rider would have been glad to do himself. But he
could not abandon beauty in distress, so, finding it impossible to
control his horse, he slipped off it, and with the _sjambock_ or
hide-whip in his hand valiantly faced the enemy. For a moment or two
the great bird stood still, blinking its lustrous round eyes at him and
gently swaying its graceful neck to and fro.

Then all of a sudden it spread out its wings and came for him like a
thunderbolt. John sprang to one side, and was aware of a rustle of
rushing feathers, and of a vision of a thick leg striking downwards
past his head. Fortunately it missed him, and the ostrich sped on like
a flash. Before he could turn, however, it was back and had landed the
full weight of one of its awful forward kicks on the broad of his
shoulders, and away he went head-over-heels like a shot rabbit. In a
second he was on his legs again, shaken indeed, but not much the worse,
and perfectly mad with fury and pain. At him came the ostrich, and at
the ostrich went he, catching it a blow across the slim neck with his
_sjambock_ that staggered it for a moment. Profiting by the check, he
seized the bird by the wing and held on like grim death with both
hands. Now they began to gyrate, slowly at first, then quicker, and yet
more quick, till at last it seemed to Captain John Niel that time and
space and the solid earth were nothing but a revolving vision fixed
somewhere in the watches of the night. Above him, like a stationary
pivot, towered the tall graceful neck, beneath him spun the top-like
legs, and in front of him was a soft black and white mass of feathers.

Thud, and a cloud of stars! He was on his back, and the ostrich, which
did not seem to be affected by giddiness, was on _him_, punishing him
dreadfully. Luckily an ostrich cannot kick a man very hard when he is
flat on the ground. If he could, there would have been an end of John
Niel, and his story need never have been written.

Half a minute or so passed, during which the bird worked his sweet will
upon his prostrate enemy, and at the end of it the man began to feel
very much as though his earthly career was closed. Just as things were
growing faint and dim to him, however, he suddenly saw a pair of white
arms clasp themselves round the ostrich’s legs from behind, and heard a
voice cry:

“Break his neck while I hold his legs, or he will kill you.”

This roused him from his torpor, and he staggered to his feet.
Meanwhile the ostrich and the young lady had come to the ground, and
were rolling about together in a confused heap, over which the elegant
neck and open hissing mouth wavered to and fro like a cobra about to
strike. With a rush John seized the neck in both his hands, and,
putting out all his strength (for he was a strong man), he twisted it
till it broke with a snap, and after a few wild and convulsive bounds
and struggles the great bird lay dead.

Then he sank down dazed and exhausted, and surveyed the scene. The
ostrich was perfectly quiet, and would never kick again, and the lady
too was quiet. He wondered vaguely if the brute had killed her—he was
as yet too weak to go and see—and then fell to gazing at her face. Her
head was pillowed on the body of the dead bird, and its feathery plumes
made it a fitting resting-place. Slowly it dawned on him that the face
was very beautiful, although it looked so pale just now. Low broad
brow, crowned with soft yellow hair, the chin very round and white, the
mouth sweet though rather large. The eyes he could not see, because
they were closed, for the lady had fainted. For the rest, she was quite
young—about twenty, tall and finely formed. Presently he felt a little
better, and, creeping towards her (for he was sadly knocked about),
took her hand and began to chafe it between his own. It was a
well-formed hand, but brown, and showed signs of doing plenty of hard
work. Soon she opened her eyes, and he noted with satisfaction that
they were very good eyes, blue in colour. Then she sat up and laughed a
little.

“Well, I am silly,” she said; “I believe I fainted.”

“It is not much to be wondered at,” said John Niel politely, and
lifting his hand to take off his hat, only to find that it had gone in
the fray. “I hope you are not very much hurt by the bird.”

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “But I am glad that you killed the
_skellum_ (vicious beast). He got out of the ostrich camp three days
ago, and has been lost ever since. He killed a boy last year, and I
told uncle he ought to shoot him then, but he would not, because he was
such a beauty.”

“Might I ask,” said John Niel, “are you Miss Croft?”

“Yes, I am—one of them. There are two of us, you know; and I can guess
who you are—you are Captain Niel, whom uncle is expecting to help him
with the farm and the ostriches.”

“If all of them are like that,” he said, pointing to the dead bird, “I
don’t think that I shall take kindly to ostrich farming.”

She laughed, showing a charming line of teeth. “Oh no,” she said, “he
was the only bad one—but, Captain Niel, I think you will find it
fearfully dull. There are nothing but Boers about here, you know. No
English people live nearer than Wakkerstroom.”

“You overlook yourself,” he said, bowing; for really this daughter of
the wilderness had a very charming air about her.

“Oh,” she answered, “I am only a girl, you know, and besides, I am not
clever. Jess, now—that’s my sister—Jess has been at school at Capetown,
and she _is_ clever. I was at Cape Town, too, though I didn’t learn
much there. But, Captain Niel, both the horses have bolted; mine has
gone home, and I expect yours has followed, and I should like to know
how we are going to get up to Mooifontein—beautiful fountain, that’s
what we call our place, you know. Can you walk?”

“I don’t know,” he answered doubtfully; “I’ll try. That bird has
knocked me about a good deal,” and accordingly he staggered on to his
legs, only to collapse with an exclamation of pain. His ankle was
sprained, and he was so stiff and bruised that he could hardly stir.
“How far is the house?” he asked.

“Only about a mile—just there; we shall see it from the crest of the
rise. Look, I’m all right. It was silly to faint, but he kicked all the
breath out of me,” and she got up and danced a little on the grass to
show him. “My word, though, I am sore! You must take my arm, that’s
all; that is if you don’t mind?”

“Oh dear no, indeed, I don’t mind,” he said laughing; and so they
started, arm affectionately linked in arm.




CHAPTER II.
HOW THE SISTERS CAME TO MOOIFONTEIN


“Captain Niel,” said Bessie Croft—for she was named Bessie—when they
had painfully limped one hundred yards or so, “will you think me rude
if I ask you a question?”

“Not at all.”

“What has induced you to come and bury yourself in this place?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I don’t think that you will like it. I don’t think,” she added
slowly, “that it is a fit place for an English gentleman and an army
officer like you. You will find the Boer ways horrid, and then there
will only be my old uncle and us two for you to associate with.”

John Niel laughed. “English gentlemen are not so particular nowadays, I
can assure you, Miss Croft, especially when they have to earn a living.
Take my case, for instance, for I may as well tell you exactly how I
stand. I have been in the army fourteen years, and I am now
thirty-four. Well, I have been able to live there because I had an old
aunt who allowed me 120 pounds a year. Six months ago she died, leaving
me the little property she possessed, for most of her income came from
an annuity. After paying expenses, duty, &c., it amounts to 1,115
pounds. Now, the interest on this is about fifty pounds a year, and I
can’t live in the army on that. Just after my aunt’s death I came to
Durban with my regiment from Mauritius, and now they are ordered home.
Well, I liked the country, and I knew that I could not afford to live
in England, so I got a year’s leave of absence, and made up my mind to
have a look round to see if I could not take to farming. Then a
gentleman in Durban told me of your uncle, and said that he wanted to
dispose of a third interest in his place for a thousand pounds, as he
was getting too old to manage it himself. So I entered into
correspondence with him, and agreed to come up for a few months to see
how I liked it; and accordingly here I am, just in time to save you
from being knocked to bits by an ostrich.”

“Yes, indeed,” she answered, laughing; “you’ve had a warm welcome at
any rate. Well, I hope you _will_ like it.”

Just as he finished his story they reached the top of the rise over
which the ostrich had pursued Bessie Croft, and saw a Kafir coming
towards them, leading the pony with one hand and Captain Niel’s horse
with the other. About twenty yards behind the horses a lady was
walking.

“Ah,” said Bessie, “they’ve caught the horses, and here is Jess come to
see what is the matter.”

By this time the lady in question was quite close, so that John was
able to gather a first impression of her. She was small and rather
thin, with quantities of curling brown hair; not by any means a lovely
woman, as her sister undoubtedly was, but possessing two very
remarkable characteristics—a complexion of extraordinary and uniform
pallor, and a pair of the most beautiful dark eyes he had ever looked
on. Altogether, though her size was almost insignificant, she was a
striking-looking person, with a face few men would easily forget.
Before he had time to observe any more the two parties had met.

“What on earth is the matter, Bessie?” Jess said, with a quick glance
at her sister’s companion, and speaking in a low full voice, with just
a slight South African accent, that is taking enough in a pretty woman.
Thereon Bessie broke out with a history of their adventure, appealing
to Captain Niel for confirmation at intervals.

Meanwhile Jess Croft stood quite still and silent, and it struck John
that her face was the most singularly impassive one he had ever seen.
It never changed, even when her sister told her how the ostrich rolled
on her and nearly killed her, or how they finally subdued the foe.
“Dear me,” he thought to herself, “what a very strange woman! She can’t
have much heart.” But just as he thought it the girl looked up, and
then he saw where the expression lay. It was in those remarkable eyes.
Immovable as was her face, the dark eyes were alight with life and a
suppressed excitement that made them shine gloriously. The contrast
between the shining eyes and the impassive face beneath them struck him
as so extraordinary as to be almost uncanny. As a matter of fact, it
was doubtless both unusual and remarkable.

“You have had a wonderful escape, but I am sorry for the bird,” she
said at last.

“Why?” asked John.

“Because we were great friends. I was the only person who could manage
him.”

“Yes,” put in Bessie, “the savage brute would follow her about like a
dog. It was just the oddest thing I ever saw. But come on; we must be
getting home, it’s growing dark. Mouti”—which, being interpreted, means
Medicine—she added, addressing the Kafir in Zulu—“help Captain Niel on
to his horse. Be careful that the saddle does not twist round; the
girths may be loose.”

Thus adjured, John, with the help of the Zulu, clambered into his
saddle, an example that the lady quickly followed, and they set off
once more through the gathering darkness. Presently he became aware
that they were passing up a drive bordered by tall blue gums, and next
minute the barking of a large dog, which he afterwards knew by the name
of Stomp, and the sudden appearance of lighted windows told him that
they had reached the house. At the door—or rather, opposite to it, for
there was a verandah in front—they halted and got off their horses. As
they dismounted there came a shout of welcome from the house, and
presently in the doorway, showing out clearly against the light,
appeared a striking and, in its way, a most pleasant figure. He—for it
was a man—was very tall, or, rather, he had been very tall. Now he was
much bent with age and rheumatism. His long white hair hung low upon
his neck, and fell back from a prominent brow. The top of the head was
quite bald, like the tonsure of a priest, and shone and glistened in
the lamplight, and round this oasis the thin white locks fell down. The
face was shrivelled like the surface of a well-kept apple, and, like an
apple, rosy red. The features were aquiline and strongly marked; the
eyebrows still black and very bushy, and beneath them shone a pair of
grey eyes, keen and bright as those of a hawk. But for all its
sharpness, there was nothing unpleasant or fierce about the face; on
the contrary, it was pervaded by a remarkable air of good-nature and
pleasant shrewdness. For the rest, the man was dressed in rough tweed
clothes, tall riding-boots, and held a broad-brimmed Boer hunting hat
in his hand. Such, as John Niel first saw him, was the outer person of
old Silas Croft, one of the most remarkable men in the Transvaal.

“Is that you, Captain Niel?” roared out the stentorian voice. “The
natives said you were coming. A welcome to you! I am glad to see
you—very glad. Why, what is the matter with you?” he went on as the
Zulu Mouti ran to help him off his horse.

“Matter, Mr. Croft?” answered John; “why, the matter is that your
favourite ostrich has nearly killed me and your niece here, and that I
have killed your favourite ostrich.”

Then followed explanations from Bessie, during which he was helped off
his horse and into the house.

“It serves me right,” said the old man. “To think of it now, just to
think of it! Well, Bessie, my love, thank God that you escaped—ay, and
you too, Captain Niel. Here, you boys, take the Scotch cart and a
couple of oxen and go and fetch the brute home. We may as well have the
feathers off him, at any rate, before the _aasvogels_ (vultures) tear
him to bits.”

After he had washed himself and tended his injuries with arnica and
water, John managed to limp into the principal sitting-room, where
supper was waiting. It was a very pleasant room, furnished in European
style, and carpeted with mats made of springbuck skins. In the corner
stood a piano, and by it a bookcase, filled with the works of standard
authors, the property, as John rightly guessed, of Bessie’s sister
Jess.

Supper went off pleasantly enough, and after it was over the two girls
sang and played whilst the men smoked. And here a fresh surprise
awaited him, for after Bessie, who apparently had now almost recovered
from her mauling, had played a piece or two creditably enough, Jess,
who so far had been nearly silent, sat down at the piano. She did not
do this willingly, indeed, for it was not until her patriarchal uncle
had insisted in his ringing, cheery voice that she should let Captain
Niel hear how she could sing that she consented. But at last she did
consent, and then, after letting her fingers stray somewhat aimlessly
along the chords, she suddenly broke out into such song as John Niel
had never heard before. Her voice, beautiful as it was, was not what is
known as a cultivated voice, and it was a German song, therefore he did
not understand it, but there was no need of words to translate its
burden. Passion, despairing yet hoping through despair, echoed in its
every line, and love, unending love, hovered over the glorious
notes—nay, possessed them like a spirit, and made them his. Up! up!
rang her wild sweet voice, thrilling his nerves till they answered to
the music as an Aeolian harp answers to the winds. On went the song
with a divine sweep, like the sweep of rushing pinions; higher, yet
higher it soared, lifting up the listener’s heart far above the world
on the trembling wings of sound—ay, even higher, till the music hung at
heaven’s gate, and falling thence, swiftly as an eagle falls, quivered,
and was dead.

John sighed, and so strongly was he moved, sank back in his chair,
feeling almost faint with the revulsion of feeling that ensued when the
notes had died away. He looked up, and saw Bessie watching him with an
air of curiosity and amusement. Jess was still leaning against the
piano, and gently touching the notes, over which her head was bent low,
showing the coils of curling hair that were twisted round it like a
coronet.

“Well, Captain Niel,” said the old man, waving his pipe in her
direction, “and what do you say to my singing-bird’s music, eh? Isn’t
it enough to draw the heart out of a man, eh, and turn his marrow to
water, eh?”

“I never heard anything quite like it,” he answered simply, “and I have
heard most singers. It is beautiful. Certainly, I never expected to
hear such singing in the Transvaal.”

Jess turned quickly, and he observed that, though her eyes were alight
with excitement, her face was as impassive as ever.

“There is no need for you to laugh at me, Captain Niel,” she said
quickly, and then, with an abrupt “Good-night,” she left the room.

The old man smiled, jerked the stem of his pipe over his shoulder after
her, and winked in a way that, no doubt, meant unutterable things, but
which did not convey much to his astonished guest, who sat still and
said nothing. Then Bessie rose and bade him good-night in her pleasant
voice, and with housewifely care inquired as to whether his room was to
his taste, and how many blankets he liked upon his bed, telling him
that if he found the odour of the moonflowers which grew near the
verandah too strong, he had better shut the right-hand window and open
that on the other side of the room. Then at length, with a piquant
little nod of her golden head, she went off, looking, John thought as
he watched her retreating figure, about as healthy, graceful, and
generally satisfactory a young woman as a man could wish to see.

“Take a glass of grog, Captain Niel,” said the old man, pushing the
square bottle towards him, “you’ll need it after the mauling that brute
gave you. By the way, I haven’t thanked you for saving my Bessie! But I
do thank you, yes, that I do. I must tell you that Bessie is my
favourite niece. Never was there such a girl—never. Moves like a
springbuck, and what an eye and form! Work too—she’ll do as much work
as three. There’s no nonsense about Bessie, none at all. She’s not a
fine lady, for all her fine looks.”

“The two sisters seem very different,” said John.

“Ay, you’re right there,” answered the old man. “You’d never think that
the same blood ran in their veins, would you? There’s three years
between them, that’s one thing. Bessie’s the youngest, you see—she’s
just twenty, and Jess is twenty-three. Lord, to think that it is
twenty-three years since that girl was born! And theirs is a queer
story too.”

“Indeed?” said his listener interrogatively.

“Ay,” Silas went on absently, knocking out his pipe, and refilling it
from a big brown jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco, “I’ll tell it to you
if you like: you are going to live in the house, and you may as well
know it. I am sure, Captain Niel, that it will go no further. You see I
was born in England, yes, and well-born too. I come from
Cambridgeshire—from the fat fen-land down round Ely. My father was a
clergyman. Well, he wasn’t rich, and when I was twenty he gave me his
blessing, thirty sovereigns in my pocket, and my passage to the Cape;
and I shook his hand, God bless him, and off I came, and here in the
old colony and this country I have been for fifty years, for I was
seventy yesterday. Well, I’ll tell you more about that another time,
it’s of the girls I’m speaking now. After I left home—some years
after—my dear old father married again, a youngish woman with some
money, but rather beneath him in life, and by her he had one son, and
then died. Well, it was but little I heard of my half-brother, except
that he had turned out very badly, married, and taken to drink, till
one night some twelve years ago, when a strange thing happened. I was
sitting here in this very room, ay, in this very chair—for this part of
the house was up then, though the wings weren’t built—smoking my pipe,
and listening to the lashing of the rain, for it was a very foul night,
when suddenly an old pointer dog I had, named Ben, began to bark.

“‘Lie down, Ben, it’s only the Kafirs,’ said I.

“Just then I thought I heard a faint sort of rapping at the door, and
Ben barked again, so I got up and opened it, and in came two little
girls wrapped in old shawls or some such gear. Well, I shut the door,
looking first to see if there were any more outside, and then I turned
and stared at the two little things with my mouth open. There they
stood, hand in hand, the water dripping from both of them; the elder
might have been eleven, and the second about eight years old. They
didn’t say anything, but the elder turned and took the shawl and hat
off the younger—that was Bessie—and there was her sweet little face and
her golden hair, and damp enough both of them were, and she put her
thumb in her mouth, and stood and looked at me till I began to think
that I was dreaming.

“‘Please, sir,’ said the taller at last, ‘is this Mr. Croft’s house—Mr.
Croft—South African Republic?’

“‘Yes, little Miss, this is his house, and this is the South African
Republic, and I am he. And now who might you be, my dears?’ I answered.

“‘If you please, sir, we are your nieces, and we have come to you from
England.’

“‘What!’ I holloaed, startled out of my wits, as well I might be.

“‘Oh, sir,’ says the poor little thing, clasping her thin wet hands,
‘please don’t send us away. Bessie is so wet, and cold and hungry too,
she isn’t fit to go any farther.’

“And she set to work to cry, whereon the little one cried also, from
fright and cold and sympathy.

“Well, of course, I took them both to the fire, and set them on my
knees, and called for Hebe, the old Hottentot woman who did my cooking,
and between us we undressed them, and wrapped them up in some old
clothes, and fed them with soup and wine, so that in half an hour they
were quite happy and not a bit frightened.

“‘And now, young ladies,’ I said, ‘come and give me a kiss, both of
you, and tell me how you came here.’

“This is the tale they told me—completed, of course, from what I learnt
afterwards—and an odd one it is. It seems that my half-brother married
a Norfolk lady—a sweet young thing—and treated her like a dog. He was a
drunken rascal, was my half-brother, and he beat his poor wife and
shamefully neglected her, and even ill-used the two little girls, till
at last the poor woman, weak as she was from suffering and ill health,
could bear it no longer, and formed the wild idea of escaping to this
country and of throwing herself upon my protection. That shows how
desperate she must have been. She scraped together and borrowed some
money, enough to pay for three second-class passages to Natal and a few
pounds over, and one day, when her brute of a husband was away on the
drink and gamble, she slipped on board a sailing ship in the London
Docks, and before he knew anything about it they were well out to sea.
But it was her last effort, poor dear soul, and the excitement of it
finished her. Before they had been ten days at sea, she sank and died,
and the two little children were left alone. What they must have
suffered, or rather what poor Jess must have suffered, for she was old
enough to feel, God only knows, but I can tell you this, she has never
got over the shock to this hour. It has left its mark on her, sir.
Still, let people say what they will, there is a Power who looks after
the helpless, and that Power took those poor, homeless, wandering
children under its wing. The captain of the vessel befriended them, and
when at last they reached Durban some of the passengers made a
subscription, and paid an old Boer, who was coming up this way with his
wife to the Transvaal, to take them under his charge. The Boer and his
_vrouw_ treated the children fairly well, but they did not do one thing
more than they bargained for. At the turn from the Wakkerstroom road,
that you came along to-day, they put the girls down, for they had no
luggage with them, and told them that if they went along there they
would come to _Meinheer_ Croft’s house. That was in the middle of the
afternoon, and they were till eight o’clock getting here, poor little
dears, for the track was fainter then than it is now, and they wandered
off into the veldt, and would have perished there in the wet and cold
had they not chanced to see the lights of the house. That was how my
nieces came here, Captain Niel, and here they have been ever since,
except for a couple of years when I sent them to the Cape for
schooling, and a lonely man I was when they were away.”

“And how about the father?” asked John Niel, deeply interested. “Did
you ever hear any more of him?”

“Hear of him, the villain!” almost shouted the old man, jumping up in
wrath. “Ay, d—n him, I heard of him. What do you think? The two chicks
had been with me some eighteen months, long enough for me to learn to
love them with all my heart, when one fine morning, as I was seeing
about the new kraal wall, I saw a fellow come riding up on an old
raw-boned grey horse. Up he comes to me, and as he came I looked at
him, and said to myself, ‘You are a drunkard you are, and a rogue, it’s
written on your face, and, what’s more, I know your face.’ You see I
did not guess that it was a son of my own father that I was looking at.
How should I?

“‘Is your name Croft?’ he said.

“‘Ay,’ I answered.

“‘So is mine,’ he went on with a sort of drunken leer. ‘I’m your
brother.’

“‘Are you?’ I said, beginning to get my back up, for I guessed what his
game was, ‘and what may you be after? I tell you at once, and to your
face, that if you are my brother you are a blackguard, and I don’t want
to know you or have anything to do with you; and if you are not, I beg
your pardon for coupling you with such a scoundrel.’

“‘Oh, that’s your tune, is it?’ he said with a sneer. ‘Well, now, my
dear brother Silas, I want my children. They have got a little
half-brother at home—for I have married again, Silas—who is anxious to
have them to play with, so if you will be so good as to hand them over,
I’ll take them away at once.’

“‘You’ll take them away, will you?’ said I, all of a tremble with rage
and fear.

“‘Yes, Silas, I will. They are mine by law, and I am not going to breed
children for you to have the comfort of their society. I’ve taken
advice, Silas, and that’s sound law,’ and he leered at me again.

“I stood and looked at that man, and thought of how he had treated
those poor children and their young mother, and my blood boiled, and I
grew mad. Without another word I jumped over the half-finished wall,
and caught him by the leg (for I was a strong man ten years ago) and
jerked him off the horse. As he came down he dropped the _sjambock_
from his hand, and I laid hold of it and then and there gave him the
soundest hiding a man ever had. Lord, how he did holloa! When I was
tired I let him get up.

“‘Now,’ I said, ‘be off with you, and if you come back here I’ll bid
the Kafirs hunt you to Natal with their sticks. This is the South
African Republic, and we don’t care overmuch about law here.’ Which we
didn’t in those days.

“‘All right, Silas,’ he said, ‘all right, you shall pay for this. I’ll
have those children, and, for your sake, I’ll make their lives a
hell—you mark my words—South African Republic or no South African
Republic. I’ve got the law on my side.’

“Off he rode, cursing and swearing, and I flung his _sjambock_ after
him. This was the first and last time that I saw my brother.”

“What became of him?” asked John Niel.

“I’ll tell you, just to show you again that there is a Power which
keeps such men in its eye. He rode back to Newcastle that night, and
went about the canteen there abusing me, and getting drunker and
drunker, till at last the canteen keeper sent for his boys to turn him
out. Well, the boys were rough, as Kafirs are apt to be with a drunken
white man, and he struggled and fought, and in the middle of it the
blood began to run from his mouth, and he dropped down dead of a broken
blood-vessel, and there was an end of him. That is the story of the two
girls, Captain Niel, and now I am off to bed. To-morrow I’ll show you
round the farm, and we will have a talk about business. Good-night to
you, Captain Niel. Good-night!”




CHAPTER III.
MR. FRANK MULLER


John Niel woke early the next morning, feeling as sore and stiff as
though he had been well beaten and then wrapped up tight in
horse-girths. He made shift, however, to dress himself, and then, with
the help of a stick, limped through the French windows that opened from
his room on to the verandah, and surveyed the scene before him. It was
a delightful spot. At the back of the stead was the steep
boulder-strewn face of the flat-topped hill that curved round on each
side, embosoming a great slope of green, in the lap of which the house
was placed. It was very solidly built of brown stone, and, with the
exception of the waggon-shed and other outbuildings which were roofed
with galvanised iron, that shone and glistened in the rays of the
morning sun in a way that would have made an eagle blink, was covered
with rich brown thatch. All along its front ran a wide verandah, up the
trellis-work of which green vines and blooming creepers trailed
pleasantly, and beyond was the broad carriage-drive of red soil,
bordered with bushy orange-trees laden with odorous flowers and green
and golden fruit. On the farther side of the orange-trees were the
gardens, fenced in with low walls of rough stone, and the orchard
planted with standard fruit-trees, and beyond these again the oxen and
ostrich kraals, the latter full of long-necked birds. To the right of
the house grew thriving plantations of blue-gum and black wattle, and
to the left was a broad stretch of cultivated lands, lying so that they
could be irrigated for winter crops by means of water led from the
great spring that gushed out of the mountain-side high above the house,
and gave its name of Mooifontein to the place.

All these and many more things John Niel saw as he looked out from the
verandah at Mooifontein, but for the moment at any rate they were lost
in the wild and wonderful beauty of the panorama that rolled away for
miles and miles at his feet, till it was bounded by the mighty range of
the Drakensberg to the left, tipped here and there with snow, and by
the dim and vast horizon of the swelling Transvaal plains to the right
and far in front of him. It was a beautiful sight, and one to make the
blood run in a man’s veins, and his heart beat happily because he was
alive to see it. Mile upon mile of grass-clothed veldt beneath, bending
and rippling like a corn-field in the quick breath of the morning,
space upon space of deep-blue sky overhead with ne’er a cloud to dim
it, and the swift rush of the wind between. Then to the left there,
impressive to look on and conducive to solemn thoughts, the mountains
rear their crests against the sky, and, crowned with the gathered snows
of the centuries whose monuments they are, from aeon to aeon gaze
majestically out over the wide plains and the ephemeral ant-like races
who tread them, and while they endure think themselves the masters of
their little world. And over all—mountain, plain, and flashing
stream—the glorious light of the African sun and the Spirit of Life
moving now as it once moved upon the darkling waters.

John stood and gazed at the untamed beauty of the scene, in his mind
comparing it to many cultivated prospects which he had known, and
coming to the conclusion that, however desirable the presence of
civilised man might be in the world, it could not be said that his
operations really add to its beauty. For the old line, “Nature
unadorned adorned the most,” still remains true in more senses than
one.

Presently his reflections were interrupted by the step of Silas Croft,
which, notwithstanding his age and bent frame, still rang firm
enough—and he turned to greet him.

“Well, Captain Niel,” said the old man, “up already! It looks well if
you mean to take to farming. Yes, it’s a pretty view, and a pretty
place too. Well, I made it. Twenty-five years ago I rode up here and
saw this spot. Look, you see that rock there behind the house? I slept
under it and woke at sunrise and looked out at this beautiful scene and
at the great veldt (it was all alive with game then), and I said to
myself, ‘Silas, for five-and-twenty years have you wandered about this
great country, and now you are getting tired of it; you’ve never seen a
fairer spot than this or a healthier; be a wise man and stop here.’ And
so I did. I bought the 3,000 _morgen_ (6,000 acres), more or less, for
10 pounds down and a case of gin, and I set to work to make this place,
and you see I have made it. Ay, it has grown under my hand, every stone
and tree of it, and you know what that means in a new country. But one
way or another I have done it, and now I have grown too old to manage
it, and that’s how I came to give out that I wanted a partner, as Mr.
Snow told you down in Durban. You see, I told Snow it must be a
gentleman; I don’t care much about the money, I’ll take a thousand for
a third share if I can get a gentleman—none of your Boers or mean
whites for me. I tell you I have had enough of Boers and their ways;
the best day of my life was when old Shepstone ran up the Union Jack
there in Pretoria and I could call myself an Englishman once more.
Lord! and to think that there are men who are subjects of the Queen and
want to be subjects of a Republic again—Mad! Captain Niel, I tell you,
quite mad! However, there’s an end of it all now. You know what Sir
Garnet Wolseley told them in the name of the Queen up at the Vaal
River, that this country would remain English until the sun stood still
in the heavens and the waters of the Vaal ran backwards.[*] That’s good
enough for me, for, as I tell these grumbling fellows who want the land
back now that we have paid their debts and defeated their enemies, no
English government is false to its word, or breaks engagements solemnly
entered into by its representatives. We leave that sort of thing to
foreigners. No, no, Captain Niel, I would not ask you to take a share
in this place if I wasn’t sure that it would remain under the British
flag. But we will talk of all this another time, and now come in to
breakfast.”

[*] A fact.—Author.

After breakfast, as John was far too lame to walk about the farm, the
fair Bessie suggested that he should come and help her to wash a batch
of ostrich feathers, and, accordingly, off he went. The _locus
operandi_ was in a space of lawn at the rear of a little clump of
_naatche_ orange-trees, of which the fruit is like that of the Maltese
orange, only larger. Here were placed an ordinary washing-tub
half-filled with warm water, and a tin bath full of cold. The ostrich
feathers, many of which were completely coated with red dirt, were
plunged first into the tub of warm water, where John Niel scrubbed them
with soap, and then transferred to the tin bath, where Bessie rinsed
them and laid them on a sheet in the sun to dry. The morning was very
pleasant, and John soon came to the conclusion that there are many more
disagreeable occupations in the world than the washing of ostrich
feathers with a lovely girl to help you. For there was no doubt but
that Bessie was lovely, looking a very type of happy, healthy womanhood
as she sat opposite to him on the little stool, her sleeves rolled up
almost to the shoulder, showing a pair of arms that would not have
disgraced a statue of Venus, and laughed and chatted away as she washed
the feathers. Now, John Niel was not a susceptible man: he had gone
through the fire years before and burnt his fingers like many another
confiding youngster but, all the same, he did wonder as he knelt there
and watched this fair girl, who somehow reminded him of a rich rosebud
bursting into bloom, how long it would be possible to live in the same
house with her without falling under the spell of her charm and beauty.
Then he began to think of Jess, and of what a strange contrast the two
were.

“Where is your sister?” he asked presently.

“Jess? Oh, I think that she has gone to the Lion Kloof, reading or
sketching, I don’t know which. You see in this establishment I
represent labour and Jess represents intellect,” and she nodded her
head prettily at him, and added, “There is a mistake somewhere, she got
all the brains.”

“Ah,” said John quietly, and looking up at her, “I don’t think that you
are entitled to complain of the way in which Nature has treated you.”

She blushed a little, more at the tone of his voice than the words, and
went on hastily, “Jess is the dearest, best, and cleverest woman in the
whole world—there. I believe that she has only one fault, and it is
that she thinks too much about me. Uncle said that he had told you how
we came here first when I was eight years old. Well, I remember that
when we lost our way on the veldt that night, and it rained so and was
so cold, Jess took off her own shawl and wrapped it round me over my
own. Well, it has been just like that with her always. I am always to
have the shawl—everything is to give way to me. But there, that is Jess
all over; she is very cold, cold as a stone I sometimes think, but when
she does care for anybody it is enough to frighten one. I don’t know a
great number of women, but somehow I do not think that there can be
many in the world like Jess. She is too good for this place; she ought
to go away to England and write books and become a famous woman,
only——” she added reflectively, “I am afraid that Jess’s books would
all be sad ones.”

Just then Bessie stopped talking and suddenly changed colour, the bunch
of lank wet feathers she held in her hand dropping from it with a
little splash back into the bath. Following her glance, John looked
down the avenue of blue-gum trees and perceived a big man with a broad
hat and mounted on a splendid black horse, cantering leisurely towards
the house.

“Who is that, Miss Croft?” he asked.

“It is a man I don’t like,” she said with a little stamp of her foot.
“His name is Frank Muller, and he is half a Boer and half an
Englishman. He is very rich, and very clever, and owns all the land
round this place, so uncle has to be civil to him, though he does not
like him either. I wonder what he wants now.”

On came the horse, and John thought that its rider was going to pass
without seeing them, when suddenly the movement of Bessie’s dress
between the _naatche_ trees caught his eye, and he pulled up and looked
round. He was a large and exceedingly handsome man, apparently about
forty years old, with clear-cut features, cold, light-blue eyes, and a
remarkable golden beard that hung down over his chest. For a Boer he
was rather smartly dressed in English-made tweed clothes, and tall
riding-boots.

“Ah, Miss Bessie,” he called out in English, “there you are, with your
pretty arms all bare. I’m in luck to be just in time to see them. Shall
I come and help you to wash the feathers? Only say the word, now——”

Just then he caught sight of John Niel, checked himself, and added:

“I have come to look for a black ox, branded with a heart and a ‘W’
inside of the heart. Do you know if your uncle has seen it on the place
anywhere?”

“No, _Meinheer_ Muller,” replied Bessie, coldly, “but he is down
there,” pointing at a kraal on the plain some half-mile away, “if you
want to go and ask about it.”

“_Mr._ Muller,” said he, by way of correction, and with a curious
contraction of the brow. “‘_Meinheer_’ is very well for the Boers, but
we are all Englishmen now. Well, the ox can wait. With your permission,
I’ll stop here till _Oom_ Croft (Uncle Croft) comes back,” and, without
further ado, he jumped off his horse and, slipping the reins over its
head as an indication to it to stand still, advanced towards Bessie
with an outstretched hand. As he came the young lady plunged both her
arms up to the elbow in the bath, and it struck John, who was observing
the scene closely, that she did this in order to avoid the necessity of
shaking hands with her stalwart visitor.

“Sorry my hands are wet,” she said, giving him a cold little nod. “Let
me introduce you, Mr. (with emphasis) Frank Muller—Captain Niel—who has
come to help my uncle with the place.”

John stretched out his hand and Muller shook it.

“Captain,” he said interrogatively—“a ship captain, I suppose?”

“No,” said John, “a Captain of the English Army.”

“Oh, a _rooibaatje_ (red jacket). Well, I don’t wonder at your taking
to farming after the Zulu war.”

“I don’t quite understand you,” said John, rather coldly.

“Oh, no offence, Captain, no offence. I only meant that you
_rooibaatjes_ did not come very well out of that war. I was there with
Piet Uys, and it was a sight, I can tell you. A Zulu had only to show
himself at night and one would see your regiments _skreck_ (stampede)
like a span of oxen when they wind a lion. And then they’d fire—ah,
they did fire—anyhow, anywhere, but mostly at the clouds, there was no
stopping them; and so, you see, I thought that you would like to turn
your sword into a ploughshare, as the Bible says—but no offence, I’m
sure—no offence.”

All this while John Niel, being English to his backbone, and cherishing
the reputation of his profession almost as dearly as his own honour,
was boiling with inward wrath, which was all the fiercer because he
knew there was some truth in the Boer’s insults. He had the sense,
however, to keep his temper—outwardly, at any rate.

“I was not in the Zulu war, Mr. Muller,” he said, and just then old
Silas Croft rode up, and the conversation dropped.

Mr. Frank Muller stopped to dinner and far on into the afternoon, for
his lost ox seemed to have entirely slipped his memory. There he sat
close to the fair Bessie, smoking and drinking gin-water, and talking
with great volubility in English sprinkled with Boer-Dutch terms that
John Niel did not understand, and gazing at the young lady in a manner
which John somehow found unpleasant. Of course it was no affair of his,
and he had no interest in the matter, but for all that he thought this
remarkable-looking Dutchman exceedingly disagreeable. At last, indeed,
he could bear it no longer, and hobbled out for a little walk with
Jess, who, in her abrupt way, offered to show him the garden.

“You don’t like that man?” she said to him, as they went slowly down
the slope in front of the house.

“No; do you?”

“I think,” replied Jess quietly, but with much emphasis, “that he is
the most odious man I ever saw—and the most curious.” Then she relapsed
into silence, only broken now and again by an occasional remark about
the flowers and trees.

Half an hour afterwards, when they arrived again at the top of the
slope, Mr. Muller was just riding off down the avenue of blue gums. By
the verandah stood a Hottentot named Jantje, who had been holding the
Dutchman’s horse. He was a curious, wizened-up little fellow, dressed
in rags, and with hair like the worn tags of a black woollen carpet.
His age might have been anything between twenty-five and sixty; it was
impossible to form any opinion on the point. Just now, however, his
yellow monkey face was convulsed with an expression of intense
malignity, and he was standing there in the sunshine cursing rapidly
beneath his breath in Dutch, and shaking his fist after the form of the
retreating Boer—a very epitome of impotent but overmastering passion.

“What is he doing?” asked John.

Jess laughed, and answered, “Jantje does not like Frank Muller any more
than I do, but I don’t know why. He will never tell me.”




CHAPTER IV.
BESSIE IS ASKED IN MARRIAGE


In due course John Niel recovered from his sprained ankle and the other
injuries inflicted on him by the infuriated cock ostrich (it is, by the
way, a humiliating thing to be knocked out of time by a feathered
fowl), and set to work to learn the routine of farm life. He did not
find this a disagreeable task, especially when he had so fair an
instructress as Bessie, who knew all about it, to show him the way in
which he should go. Naturally of an energetic and hard-working
temperament, he very soon fell more or less into the swing of the
thing, and at the end of six weeks began to talk quite learnedly of
cattle and ostriches and sweet and sour veldt. About once a week or so
Bessie used to put him through a regular examination as to his
progress; also she gave him lessons in Dutch and Zulu, both of which
tongues she spoke to perfection; so it will be seen that John did not
lack for pleasant and profitable employment. Also, as time went on he
grew much attached to Silas Croft. The old gentleman, with his
handsome, honest face, his large and varied stock of experience and his
sturdy English character, made a great impression on his mind. He had
never met a man quite like him before. Nor was this friendship
unreciprocated, for his host took a wonderful fancy to John Niel.

“You see, my dear,” he explained to his niece Bessie, “he is quiet, and
he doesn’t know much about farming, but he’s willing to learn, and such
a gentleman. Now, where one has Kafirs to deal with, as on a place like
this, you must have a _gentleman_. Your mean white will never get
anything out of a Kafir; that’s why the Boers kill them and flog them,
because they can’t get anything out of them without. But you see
Captain Niel gets on well enough with the ‘boys.’ I think he’ll do, my
dear, I think he’ll do,” and Bessie quite agreed with him. And so it
came to pass that after this six weeks’ trial the bargain was struck
finally, and John paid over his thousand pounds, becoming the owner of
a third interest in Mooifontein.

Now it is not possible, in a general way, for a man of John Niel’s age
to live in the same house with a young and lovely woman like Bessie
Croft without running more or less risk of entanglement. Especially is
this so when the two people have little or no outside society or
distraction to divert their attention from each other. Not that there
was, at any rate as yet, the slightest hint of affection between them.
Only they liked one another very much, and found it pleasant to be a
good deal together. In short, they were walking along that easy,
winding road which leads to the mountain paths of love. It is a very
broad road, like another road that runs elsewhere, and, also like this
last, it has a wide gate. Sometimes, too, it leads to destruction. But
for all that it is a most agreeable one to follow hand-in-hand, winding
as it does through the pleasant meadows of companionship. The view is
rather limited, it is true, and homelike—full of familiar things. There
stand the kine, knee-deep in grass; there runs the water; and there
grows the corn. Also you can stop if you like. By-and-by it is
different. By-and-by, when the travellers tread the heights of passion,
precipices will yawn and torrents rush, lightnings will fall and storms
will blind; and who can know that they shall attain at last to that
far-off peak, crowned with the glory of a perfect peace which men call
Happiness? There are those who say it never can be reached, and that
the halo which rests upon its slopes is no earthly light, but rather,
as it were, a promise and a beacon—a glow reflected whence we know not,
and lying on this alien earth as the sun’s light lies on the dead bosom
of the moon. Some declare, again, that they have climbed its topmost
pinnacle and tasted of the fresh breath of heaven which sweeps around
its heights—ay, and heard the quiring of immortal harps and the
swan-like sigh of angels’ wings; and then behold! a mist has fallen
upon them, and they have wandered in it, and when it cleared they were
on the mountain paths once more, and the peak was far away. And a few
there are who tell us that they live there always, listening to the
voice of God; but these are old and worn with journeying—men and women
who have outlived passions and ambitions and the fire heats of love,
and who now, girt about with memories, stand face to face with the
sphinx Eternity.

But John Niel was no chicken, nor very likely to fall in love with the
first pretty face he met. He had once, years ago, gone through that
melancholy stage, and there, he thought, was an end of it. Moreover, if
Bessie attracted him, so did Jess in a different way. Before he had
been a week in the house he came to the conclusion that Jess was the
strangest woman he had ever met, and in her own fashion one of the most
attractive. Her very impassiveness added to her charm; for who is there
in this world who is not eager to learn a secret? To him Jess was a
riddle of which he did not know the key. That she was clever and
well-informed he soon discovered from her rare remarks; that she could
sing like an angel he also knew; but what was the mainspring of her
mind—round what axis did it revolve—this was the puzzle. Clearly enough
it was not like most women’s, least of all like that of happy, healthy,
plain-sailing Bessie. So curious did he become to fathom these
mysteries that he took every opportunity to associate with her, and,
when he had time, would even go out with her on her sketching, or
rather flower-painting, expeditions. On these occasions she would
sometimes begin to talk, but it was always about books, or England or
some intellectual question. She never spoke of herself.

Yet it soon became evident to John that she liked his society, and
missed him when he did not come. It never occurred to him what a boon
it was to a girl of considerable intellectual attainments, and still
greater intellectual capacities and aspirations, to be thrown for the
first time into the society of a cultivated and intelligent gentleman.
John Niel was no empty-headed, one-sided individual. He had both read
and thought, and even written a little, and in him Jess found a mind
which, though of an inferior stamp, was more or less kindred to her
own. Although he did not understand her she understood him, and at
last, had he but known it, there rose a far-off dawning light upon the
twilight of her heart that thrilled and changed it as the first faint
rays of morning thrill and change the darkness of the night. What if
she should learn to love this man, and teach him to love her? To most
women such a thought more or less involves the idea of marriage, and
that change of status which for the most part they consider desirable.
But Jess did not think much of that: what she did think of was the
blessed possibility of being able to lay down her life, as it were, in
the life of another—of at last finding somebody who understood her and
whom she could understand, who would cut the shackles that bound down
the wings of her genius, so that she could rise and bear him with her
as, in Bulwer Lytton’s beautiful story, Zoe would have borne her lover.
Here at length was a man who _understood_, who was something more than
an animal, and who possessed the god-like gift of brains, the gift that
had been a curse rather than a blessing to her, lifting her above the
level of her sex and shutting her off as by iron doors from the
comprehension of those around her. Ah! if only this perfect love of
which she had read so much would come to him and her, life might
perhaps grow worth the living.

It is a curious thing, but in such matters most men never learn wisdom
from experience. A man of John Niel’s age might have guessed that it is
dangerous work playing with explosives, and that the quietest, most
harmless-looking substances are sometimes the most explosive. He might
have known that to set to work to cultivate the society of a woman with
such tell-tale eyes as Jess’s was to run the risk of catching the fire
from them himself, to say nothing of setting her alight: he might have
known that to bring all the weight of his cultivated mind to bear on
her mind, to take the deepest interest in her studies, to implore her
to let him see the poetry Bessie told him she wrote, but which she
would show to no living soul, and to evince the most evident delight in
her singing, were one and all hazardous things to do. Yet he did them
and thought no harm.

As for Bessie, she was delighted that her sister should have found
anybody to whom she cared to talk or who could understand her. It never
occurred to her that Jess might fall in love. Jess was the last person
to fall in love. Nor did she calculate what the results might be to
John. As yet, at any rate, she had no interest in Captain Niel—of
course not.

And so things went on pleasantly enough to all concerned in this drama
till one fine day when the storm-clouds began to gather. John had been
about the farm as usual till dinner time, after which he took his gun
and told Jantje to saddle up his shooting pony. He was standing on the
verandah, waiting for the pony to appear, and by him was Bessie,
looking particularly attractive in a white dress, when suddenly he
caught sight of Frank Muller’s great black horse, and upon it that
gentleman himself, cantering up the avenue of blue gums.

“Hullo, Miss Bessie,” he said, “here comes your friend.”

“Bother!” said Bessie, stamping her foot; and then, with a quick look,
“Why do you call him my friend?”

“I imagine that he considers himself so, to judge from the number of
times a week he comes to see you,” John answered with a shrug. “At any
rate, he isn’t mine, so I am off shooting. Good-bye. I hope that you
will enjoy yourself.”

“You are not kind,” she said in a low voice, turning her back upon him.

In another moment he was gone, and Frank Muller had arrived.

“How do you do, Miss Bessie?” he said, jumping from his horse with the
rapidity of a man who had been accustomed to rough riding all his life.
“Where is the _rooibaatje_ off to?”

“Captain Niel is going out shooting,” she said coldly.

“So much the better for you and me, Miss Bessie. We can have a pleasant
talk. Where is that black monkey Jantje? Here, Jantje, take my horse,
you ugly devil, and mind you look after him, or I’ll cut the liver out
of you!”

Jantje took the horse, with a forced grin of appreciation at the joke,
and led him off to the stable.

“I don’t think that Jantje likes you, _Meinheer_ Muller,” said Bessie,
spitefully, “and I do not wonder at it if you talk to him like that. He
told me the other day that he had known you for twenty years,” and she
looked at him inquiringly.

This casual remark produced a strange effect on her visitor, who turned
colour beneath his tanned skin.

“He lies, the black hound,” he said, “and I’ll put a bullet through him
if he says it again! What should I know about him, or he about me? Can
I keep count of every miserable man-monkey I meet?” and he muttered a
string of Dutch oaths into his long beard.

“Really, _Meinheer!_” said Bessie.

“Why do you always call me ‘_Meinheer_’?” he asked, turning so fiercely
on her that she started back a step. “I tell you I am not a Boer. I am
an Englishman. My mother was English; and besides, thanks to Lord
Carnarvon, we are all English now.”

“I don’t see why you should mind being thought a Boer,” she said
coolly: “there are some very good people among the Boers, and besides,
you used to be a great ‘patriot.’”

“Used to be—yes; and so the trees used to bend to the north when the
wind blew that way, but now they bend to the south, for the wind has
turned. By-and-by it may set to the north again—that is another
matter—then we shall see.”

Bessie made no answer beyond pursing up her pretty mouth and slowly
picking a leaf from the vine that trailed overhead.

The big Dutchman took off his hat and stroked his beard perplexedly.
Evidently he was meditating something that he was afraid to say. Twice
he fixed his cold eyes on Bessie’s fair face, and twice looked down
again. The second time she took alarm.

“Excuse me one minute,” she said, and made as though to enter the
house.

“_Wacht een beeche_” (wait a bit), he ejaculated, breaking into Dutch
in his agitation, and even catching hold of her white dress with his
big hand.

Drawing the dress from him with a quick twist of her lithe form, she
turned and faced him.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, in a tone that could not be called
encouraging: “you were going to say something.”

“Yes—ah, that is—I was going to say——” and he paused.

Bessie stood with a polite look of expectation on her face, and waited.

“I was going to say—that, in short, that I want to marry you!”

“Oh!” exclaimed Bessie with a start.

“Listen,” he went on hoarsely, his words gathering force as he spoke,
as is the way even with uncultured people when they speak from the
heart. “Listen! I love you, Bessie; I have loved you for three years.
Every time I have seen you I have loved you more. Don’t say me nay—you
don’t know how I do love you. I dream of you every night; sometimes I
dream that I hear your dress rustling, then you come and kiss me, and
it is like being in heaven.”

Here Bessie made a gesture of disgust.

“There, I have offended you, but don’t be angry with me. I am very
rich, Bessie; there is the place here, and then I have four farms in
Lydenburg and ten thousand _morgen_ up in Waterberg, and a thousand
head of cattle, besides sheep and horses and money in the bank. You
shall have everything your own way,” he went on, seeing that the
inventory of his goods did not appear to impress her—“everything—the
house shall be English fashion; I will build a new _sit-kammer_
(sitting-room) and it shall be furnished from Natal. There, I love you,
I say. You won’t say no, will you?” and he caught her by the hand.

“I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Muller,” answered Bessie, snatching
away her hand, “but—in short, I cannot marry you. No, it is no use, I
cannot indeed. There, please say no more—here comes my uncle. Forget
all about it, Mr. Muller.”

Her suitor looked up; there was old Silas Croft sure enough, but he was
some way off, and walking slowly.

“Do you mean it?” he said beneath his breath.

“Yes, yes, of course I mean it. Why do you force me to repeat it?”

“It is that damned _rooibaatje_,” he broke out. “You used not to be
like this before. Curse him, the white-livered Englishman! I will be
even with him yet; and I tell you what it is, Bessie: you shall marry
me, whether you like or no. Look here, do you think I am the sort of
man to play with? You go to Wakkerstroom and ask what sort of a man
Frank Muller is. See! I want you—I must have you. I could not live if I
thought that I should never get you for myself. And I tell you I will
do it. I don’t care of it costs me my life, and your _rooibaatje’s_
too. I’ll do it if I have to stir up a revolt against the Government.
There, I swear it by God or by the Devil, it’s all one to me!” And
growing inarticulate with passion, he stood before her clinching and
unclinching his great hand, and his lips trembling.

Bessie was very frightened; but she was a brave woman, and rose to the
emergency.

“If you go on talking like that,” she said, “I shall call my uncle. I
tell you that I will not marry you, Frank Muller, and that nothing
shall ever make me marry you. I am very sorry for you, but I have not
encouraged you, and I will never marry you—never!”

He stood for half a minute or so looking at her, and then burst into a
savage laugh.

“I think that some day or other I shall find a way to make you,” Muller
said, and turning, he went without another word.

A couple of minutes later Bessie heard the sound of a horse galloping,
and looking up she saw her wooer’s powerful form vanishing down the
vista of blue gums. Also she heard somebody crying out as though in
pain at the back of the house, and, more to relieve her mind than for
any other reason, she went to see what it was. By the stable door she
found the Hottentot Jantje, shrieking, cursing and twisting round and
round, his hand pressed to his side, from which the blood was running.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Baas Frank!” he answered—“Baas Frank hit me with his whip!”

“The brute!” said Bessie, the tears starting to her eyes with anger.

“Never mind, missie, never mind,” gasped the Hottentot, his ugly face
growing livid with fury, “it is only one more to me. I cut it on this
stick”—and he held up a long thick stick he carried, on which were
several notches, including three deep ones at the top just below the
knob. “Let him look out sharp—let him search the grass—let him creep
round the bush—let him watch as he will, one day he will find Jantje,
and Jantje will find him!”

“Why did Frank Muller gallop away like that?” asked her uncle of Bessie
when she got back to the verandah.

“We had some words,” she answered shortly, not seeing the use of
explaining matters to the old man.

“Ah, indeed, indeed. Well, be careful, my love. It’s ill to quarrel
with a man like Frank Muller. I’ve known him for many years, and he has
a black heart when he is crossed. You see, my love, you can deal with a
Boer and you can deal with an Englishman, but cross-bred dogs are hard
to handle. Take my advice, and make it up with Frank Muller.”

All of which sage advice did not tend to raise Bessie’s spirits, that
were already sufficiently depressed.




CHAPTER V.
DREAMS ARE FOOLISHNESS


When, at the approach of Frank Muller, John Niel left Bessie on the
verandah, he had taken his gun, and, having whistled to the pointer dog
Pontac, he mounted his shooting pony and started in quest of
partridges. On the warm slopes of the hills round Wakkerstroom a large
species of partridge is very abundant, particularly in the patches of
red grass with which the slopes are sometimes clothed. It is a merry
sound to hear these birds calling from all directions just after
daybreak, and one to make the heart of every true sportsman rejoice
exceedingly. On leaving the house John proceeded up the side of the
hill behind it—his pony picking its way carefully between the stones,
and the dog Pontac ranging about two or three hundred yards off, for in
this sort of country it is necessary to have a dog with a wide range.
Presently seeing him stop under a mimosa thorn and suddenly stiffen out
as if he had been petrified, John made the best of his way towards him.
Pontac stood still for a few seconds, and then slowly and deliberately
veered his head round as though it worked on a hinge to see if his
master was coming. John knew his ways. Three times would that
remarkable old dog look round thus, and if the gun had not then arrived
he would to a certainty run in and flush the birds. This was a rule
that he never broke, for his patience had a fixed limit. On this
occasion, however, John arrived before it was reached, and, jumping off
his pony, cocked his gun and marched slowly up, full of happy
expectation. On drew the dog, his eye cold and fixed, saliva dropping
from his mouth, and his head, on which was frozen an extraordinary
expression of instinctive ferocity, outstretched to its utmost limit.

Pontac was under the mimosa thorn now and up to his belly in the warm
red grass. Where could the birds be? _Whirr!_ and a great feathered
shell seemed to have burst at his very feet. What a covey! twelve brace
if there was a bird, and they had all been lying beak to beak in a
space no bigger than a cart wheel. Up went John’s gun and off too, a
little sooner than it should have done.

“Missed him clean! Now then for the left barrel.” Same result. We will
draw a veil over the profanity that ensued. A minute later and it was
all over, and John and Pontac were regarding each other with mutual
contempt and disgust.

“It was all you, you brute,” said John to Pontac. “I thought you were
going to run in, and you hurried me.”

“Ugh!” said Pontac to John, or at least he looked it. “Ugh! you
disgusting bad shot. What is the good of pointing for you? It’s enough
to make a dog sick.”

The covey—or rather the collection of old birds, for this kind of
partridge sometimes “packs” just before the breeding season—had
scattered all about the place. It was not long before Pontac found some
of them, and this time John got one bird—a beautiful great partridge he
was too, with yellow legs—and missed another. Again Pontac pointed, and
a brace rose. Bang! down goes one; bang with the other barrel. Caught
him, by Jove, just as he topped the stone. Hullo! Pontac is still on
the point. Slip in two more cartridges. Oh, a leash this time! bang!
bang! and down come a brace of them—two brace of partridges without
moving a yard.

Life has joys for all men, but, I verily believe, it has no joy to
compare to that of the moderate shot and earnest sportsman when he has
just killed half a dozen driven partridges without a miss, or ten
rocketing pheasants with eleven cartridges, or, better still, a couple
of woodcock right and left. Sweet to the politician are the cheers that
announce the triumph of his cause and of himself; sweet to the
desponding writer is the unexpected public recognition by reviewers of
talents with which previously nobody had been much impressed; sweet to
all men are the light of women’s eyes and the touch of women’s lips.
But though he have experienced all these things, to the true sportsman
and the _moderate shot_, sweeter far is it to see the arched wings of
the driven bird bent like Cupid’s bow come flashing fast towards him,
to feel the touch of the stock as it fits itself against his shoulder,
and the kindly give of the trigger, and then, oh thrilling sight! to
perceive the wonderful and yet awful change from life to death, the
puff of feathers, and the hurtling passage of the dull mass borne
onward by its own force to fall twenty yards from where the pellets
struck it. Next session the politician will be hooted down, next year
perhaps the reviewers will cut the happy writer to ribbons and decorate
their journals with his fragments, next week you will have wearied of
those dear smiles, or, more likely still, they will be bestowed
elsewhere. Vanity of vanities, my son, each and all of them! But if you
are a true sportsman (yes, even though you be but a moderate shot), it
will always be a glorious thing to go out shooting, and when you chance
to shoot well earth holds no such joy as that which will glow in your
honest breast (for all sportsmen are honest), and it remains to be
proved if heaven does either. It is a grand sport, though the pity of
it is that it should be a cruel one.

Such was the paean that John sang in his heart as he contemplated those
fine partridges before lovingly transferring them to his bag. But his
luck to-day was not destined to stop at partridges, for hardly had he
ridden over the edge of the boulder-strewn side, and on to the flat
table-top of the great hill which covered some five hundred acres of
land, before he perceived, emerging from the shelter of a tuft of grass
about a hundred and seventy yards away, nothing less than the tall neck
and whiskered head of a large _pauw_ or bustard.

Now it is quite useless to try and ride straight up to a bustard, and
this he knew. The only thing to do is to excite his curiosity and fix
his attention by moving round and round him in an ever-narrowing
circle. Putting his pony to a canter, John proceeded to do this with a
heart beating with excitement. Round and round he went; the _pauw_ had
vanished now, he was squatting in the tuft of grass. The last circle
brought him to within seventy yards, and he did not dare to ride any
nearer, so jumping off his pony he ran in towards the bird as hard as
he could go. When he had covered ten paces the _pauw_ was rising, but
they are heavy birds, and he was within forty yards before it was
fairly on the wing. Then he pulled up and fired both barrels of No. 4
into it. Down it came, and, incautious man, he rushed forward in
triumph without reloading his gun. Already was his hand outstretched to
seize the prize, when, behold! the great wings spread themselves out
and the bird was flying away. John stood dancing upon the veldt, but
observing that it settled within a couple of hundred yards, he ran
back, mounted his pony, and pursued it. As he drew near it rose again,
and flew this time a hundred yards only, and so it went on till at last
he got within gun-shot of the king of birds and killed it.

By this time he was across the mountain-top, and on the brink of the
most remarkable chasm he had ever seen. The place was known as Lion’s
Kloof, or Leeuwen Kloof in Dutch, because three lions had once been
penned up by a party of Boers and shot there. This chasm or gorge was
between a quarter and half a mile long, about six hundred feet in
width, and a hundred and fifty to a hundred and eighty feet deep.
Evidently it owed its origin to the action of running water, for at its
head, just to the right of where John Niel stood, a little stream
welling from hidden springs in the flat mountain-top trickled from
stratum to stratum, forming a series of crystal pools and tiny
waterfalls, till at last it reached the bottom of the mighty gorge, and
pursued its way through it to the plains beyond, half-hidden by the
umbrella-topped mimosa and other thorns that were scattered about.
Without doubt this little stream was the parent of the ravine it
trickled down and through, but, wondered John Niel, how many centuries
of patient, never-ceasing flow must have been necessary to the vast
result before him? First centuries of saturation of the soil piled on
and between the bed rocks that lay beneath it and jutted up through it,
then centuries of floods caused by rain and perhaps by melting snows,
to carry away the loosened mould; then centuries upon centuries more of
flowing and of rainfall to wash the debris clean and complete the
colossal work.

I say the rocks that jutted up through the soil, for the kloof was not
clean cut. All along its sides, and here and there in its arena, stood
mighty columns or fingers of rock, not solid indeed, but formed by huge
boulders piled mason fashion one upon another, as though the Titans of
some dead age had employed themselves in building them up, overcoming
their tendency to fall by the mere crushing weight above, that kept
them steady even when the wild breath of the storms came howling down
the gorge and tried its strength against them. About a hundred paces
from the near end of the chasm, some ninety or more feet in height,
rose the most remarkable of these giant pillars, to which the remains
at Stonehenge are but as toys. It was formed of seven huge boulders,
the largest, that at the bottom, about the size of a moderate cottage,
and the smallest, that at the top, perhaps some eight or ten feet in
diameter. These boulders were rounded like a cricket-ball—evidently
through the action of water—and yet the hand of Nature had contrived to
balance them, each one smaller than that beneath, the one upon the
other, and to keep them so. But this was not always the case. For
instance, a very similar mass which once stood on the near side of the
perfect pillar had fallen, all except its two foundation stones, and
the rocks that formed it lay scattered about like monstrous petrified
cannon-balls. One of these had split in two, and seated on it, looking
very small and far off at the bottom of that vast gulf, John discovered
Jess Croft, apparently engaged in sketching.

He dismounted from his shooting pony, and looking about him perceived
that it was possible to descend by following the course of the stream
and clambering down the natural steps it had cut in its rocky bed.
Throwing the reins over the pony’s head, and leaving him with the dog
Pontac to stand and stare about him as South African shooting ponies
are accustomed to do, he laid down his gun and game and proceeded to
descend, pausing every now and again to admire the wild beauty of the
scene and examine the hundred varieties of moss and ferns, the last
mostly of the maiden-hair (_Capillus Veneris_) genus, that clothed
every cranny and every rock where they could find foothold and win
refreshment from the water or the spray of the cascades. As he drew
near the bottom of the gorge he saw that on the borders of the stream,
wherever the soil was moist, grew thousands upon thousands of white
arums, “pig lilies” as they call them in Africa, which were now in full
bloom. He had noticed these lilies from above, but thence, owing to the
distance, they seemed so small that he took them for everlastings or
anemones. John could not see Jess now, for she was hidden by a bush
that grows on the banks of the streams in South Africa in low-lying
land, and which at certain seasons of the year is completely covered
with masses of the most gorgeous scarlet bloom. His footsteps fell very
softly on the moss and flowers, and when he passed round the
glorious-looking bush it was evident that she had not heard him, for
she was asleep. Her hat was off, but the bush shaded her, and her head
had fallen forward over her sketching block and rested upon her hand. A
ray of light that came through the bush played over her curling brown
hair, and threw warm shadows on her white face and the whiter wrist and
hand by which it was supported.

John stood there and looked at her, and the old curiosity took
possession of him to understand this feminine enigma. Many a man before
him has been the victim of a like desire, and lived to regret that he
did not leave it ungratified. It is not well to try to lift the curtain
of the unseen, it is not well to call to heaven to show its glory, or
to hell to give us touch and knowledge of its yawning fires. Knowledge
comes soon enough; many of us will say that knowledge has come too soon
and left us desolate. There is no bitterness like the bitterness of
wisdom: so cried the great Koheleth, and so hath cried many a son of
man following blindly on his path. Let us be thankful for the dark
places of the earth—places where we may find rest and shadow, and the
heavy sweetness of the night. Seek not after mysteries, O son of man,
be content with the practical and the proved and the broad light of
day; peep not, mutter not the words of awakening. Understand her who
would be understood and is comprehensible to those that run, and for
the others let them be, lest your fate should be as the fate of Eve,
and as the fate of Lucifer, Star of the morning. For here and there
beats a human heart from which it is not wise to draw the veil—a heart
in which many things are dim as half-remembered dreams in the brain of
the sleeper. Draw not the veil, whisper not the word of life in the
silence where all things sleep, lest in that kindling breath of love
and pain pale shapes arise, take form, and fright you!

A minute or so might have passed when suddenly, and with a little
start, Jess opened her great eyes, wherein the shadow of darkness lay,
and gazed at him.

“Oh!” she said with a little tremor, “is it you or is it my dream?”

“Don’t be afraid,” he answered cheerfully, “it is I—in the flesh.”

She covered her face with her hand for a moment, then withdrew it, and
he noticed that her eyes had changed curiously in that moment. They
were still large and beautiful as they always were, but there was a
change. Just now they had seemed as though her soul were looking
through them. Doubtless it was because the pupils had been enlarged by
sleep.

“Your dream! What dream?” he asked, laughing.

“Never mind,” she answered in a quiet way that excited his curiosity
more than ever. “It was about this Kloof—and you—but ‘dreams are
foolishness.’”




CHAPTER VI.
THE STORM BREAKS


“Do you know, you are a very odd person, Miss Jess,” John said
presently, with a little laugh. “I don’t think you can have a happy
mind.”

She looked up. “A happy mind?” she said. “Who _can_ have a happy mind?
Nobody who feels. Supposing,” she went on after a pause—“supposing one
puts oneself and one’s own little interests and joys and sorrows quite
away, how is it possible to be happy, when one feels the breath of
human misery beating on one’s face, and sees the tide of sorrow and
suffering creeping up to one’s feet? You may be on a rock yourself and
out of the path of it, till the spring floods or the hurricane wave
come to sweep you away, or you may be afloat upon it: whichever it is,
it is quite impossible, if you have any heart, to be indifferent.”

“Then only the indifferent are happy?”

“Yes, the indifferent and the selfish; but, after all, it is the same
thing: indifference is the perfection of selfishness.”

“I am afraid that there must be lots of selfishness in the world, for
certainly there is plenty of happiness, all evil things
notwithstanding. I should have said that happiness springs from
goodness and a sound digestion.”

Jess shook her head as she answered, “I may be wrong, but I don’t see
how anybody who feels can be quite happy in a world of sickness,
suffering, slaughter, and death. I saw a Kafir woman die yesterday, and
her children crying over her. She was a poor creature and had a rough
lot, but she loved her life, and her children loved her. Who can be
happy and thank God for His creation when he has just seen such a
thing? But there, Captain Niel, my ideas are very crude, and I dare say
very wrong, and everybody has thought them before: at any rate, I am
not going to inflict them on you. What is the use of it?” and she went
on with a laugh: “what is the use of anything? The same old thoughts
passing through the same human minds from year to year and century to
century, just as the same clouds float across the same blue sky. The
clouds are born in the sky, and the thoughts are born in the brain, and
they both end in tears and re-arise in blind, bewildering mist, and
this is the beginning and end of thoughts and clouds. They arise out of
the blue; they overshadow and break into storms and tears, then they
are drawn up into the blue again, and the story begins afresh.”

“So you don’t think that one can be happy in this world?” he asked.

“I did not say that—I never said that. I do think that happiness is
possible. It is possible if one can love somebody so hard that one can
quite forget oneself and everything else except that person, and it is
possible if one can sacrifice oneself for others. There is no true
happiness outside of love and self-sacrifice, or rather outside of
love, for it includes the other. This is gold, and all the rest is
gilt.”

“How do you know that?” he asked quickly. “You have never been in
love.”

“No,” she answered, “I have never been in love like that, but all the
happiness I have had in my life has come to me from loving. I believe
that love is the secret of the world: it is like the philosopher’s
stone they used to look for, and almost as hard to find, but if you
find it it turns everything to gold. Perhaps,” she went on with a
little laugh, “when the angels departed from the earth they left us
love behind, that by it and through it we may climb up to them again.
It is the one thing that lifts us above the brutes. Without love man is
a brute, and nothing but a brute; with love he draws near to God. When
everything else falls away the love will endure because it cannot die
while there is any life, if it is true love, for it is immortal. Only
it must be true—you see it must be true.”

He had penetrated her reserve now; the ice of her manner broke up
beneath the warmth of her words, and her face, usually impassive, had
caught life and light from the eyes above, and acquired a certain
beauty of its own. John looked at it, and understood something of the
untaught and ill-regulated intensity and depth of the nature of this
curious girl. He met her eyes and they moved him strangely, though he
was not an emotional man, and was too old to experience spasmodic
thrills at the chance glances of a pretty woman. He moved towards her,
looking at her curiously.

“It would be worth living to be loved like that,” he said, more to
himself than to her.

Jess did not answer, but she let her eyes rest on his. Indeed, she did
more, for she put her soul into them and gazed and gazed till John Niel
felt as though he were mesmerised. And as she gazed there rose up in
her breast a knowledge that if she willed it she could gain this man’s
heart and hold it against all the world, for her nature was stronger
than his nature, and her mind, untrained though it be, encompassed his
mind and could pass over it and beat it down as the wind beats down the
tossing seas. All this she learnt in a moment, in the twinkling of an
eye: she could not tell how she knew it, but she did know it as surely
as she knew that the blue sky stretched overhead, and, what is more—for
the moment, at any rate—he knew it too. This strange strong certainty
came on her as a shock and a revelation, like the tidings of some great
joy or grief, and for a moment left her heart empty of all things else.

Jess dropped her eyes suddenly.

“I think,” she said quietly, “that we have been talking a great deal of
nonsense, and that I want to finish my sketch.”

He rose and left her, for he was wanted at home, saying as he went that
he thought there was a storm coming up; the air was so quiet, and the
wind had fallen as it does before an African tempest. Presently on
looking round she saw him slowly climbing the precipitous ascent to the
table-land above the gulf.

It was one of those glorious afternoons that sometimes come in the
African spring, although it was so intensely still. Everywhere appeared
the proofs of evidences of life. The winter was over, and now, from the
sadness and sterility of its withered age, sprang youth and lovely
summer clad in sunshine, bediamonded with dew, and fragrant with the
breath of flowers. Jess lay back and looked up into the infinite depths
above. How blue they were, and how measureless! She could not see the
angry clouds that lay like visible omens on the horizon. Look, there,
miles above her, was one tiny circling speck. It was a vulture,
watching her from his airy heights and descending a little to see if
she were dead, or only sleeping.

Involuntarily she shuddered. The bird of death reminded her of Death
himself also hanging high up yonder in the blue and waiting his
opportunity to fall upon the sleeper. Then her eyes fell upon a bough
of the glorious flowering bush under which she rested. It was not more
than four feet above her head, but she lay so still and motionless that
a jewelled honeysucker came and hovered over the flowers, darting from
one to another like a many-coloured flash. Thence her glance travelled
to the great column of boulders that towered above her, and that seemed
to say, “I am very old. I have seen many springs and many winters, and
have looked down on many sleeping maids, and where are they now? All
dead—all dead,” and an old baboon in the rocks with startling
suddenness barked out “_all dead_” in answer.

Around her were the blooming lilies and the lustiness of springing
life; the heavy air was sweet with the odour of ferns and the mimosa
flowers. The running water splashed and musically fell; the sunlight
shot in golden bars athwart the shade, like the memory of happy days in
the grey vista of a life; away in the cliffs yonder, the rock-doves
were preparing to nest by hundreds, and waking the silence with their
cooing and the flutter of their wings. Even the grim old eagle perched
on the pinnacle of the peak was pruning himself, contentedly happy in
the knowledge that his mate had laid an egg in that dark corner of the
cliff. All things rejoiced and cried aloud that summer was at hand and
that it was time to bloom and love and nest. Soon it would be winter
again, when things died, and next summer other things would live under
the sun, and these perchance would be forgotten. That was what they
seemed to say.

And as Jess lay and heard, her youthful blood, drawn by Nature’s
magnetic force, as the moon draws the tides, rose in her veins like the
sap in the budding trees, and stirred her virginal serenity. All the
bodily natural part of her caught the tones of Nature’s happy voice
that bade her break her bonds, live and love, and be a woman. And lo!
the spirit within her answered to it, flinging wide her bosom’s doors,
and of a sudden, as it were, something quickened and lived in her heart
that was of her and yet had its own life—a life apart; something that
sprang from her and another, which would always be with her now and
could never die. She rose pale and trembling, as a woman trembles at
the first stirring of the child that she shall bear, and clung to the
flowery bough of the beautiful bush above, then sank down again,
feeling that the spirit of her girlhood had departed from her, and
another angel had entered there; knowing that she loved with heart and
soul and body, and was a very woman.

She had called to Love as the wretched call to Death, and Love had come
in his strength and possessed her utterly; and now for a little while
she was afraid to pass into the shadow of his wings, as the wretched
who call to Death fear him when they feel his icy fingers. But the fear
passed, and the great joy and the new consciousness of power and of
identity that the inspiration of a true passion gives to some strong
deep natures remained, and after a while Jess prepared to make her way
home across the mountain-top, feeling as though she were another being.
Still she did not go, but lay there with closed eyes and drank of this
new intoxicating wine. So absorbed was she that she did not notice that
the doves had ceased to call, and that the eagle had fled away for
shelter. She was not aware of the great and solemn hush which had taken
the place of the merry voice of beast and bird and preceded the
breaking of the gathered storm.

At last as she rose to go Jess opened her dark eyes, which, for the
most part, had been shut while this great change was passing over her,
and with a natural impulse turned to look once more on the place where
her happiness had found her, then sank down again with a little
exclamation. Where was the light and the glory and all the happiness of
the life that moved and grew around her? Gone, and in its place
darkness and rising mist and deep and ominous shadows. While she lay
and thought, the sun had sunk behind the hill and left the great gulf
nearly dark, and, as is common in South Africa, the heavy storm-cloud
had crept across the blue sky and sealed the light from above. A drear
wind came moaning up the gorge from the plains beyond; the heavy
rain-drops began to fall one by one; the lightning flickered fitfully
in the belly of the advancing cloud. The storm that John had feared was
upon her.

Then came a dreadful hush. Jess had recovered herself by now, and,
knowing what to expect, she snatched up her sketching-block and hurried
into the shelter of a little cave hollowed by water in the side of the
cliff. And now with a rush of ice-cold air the tempest burst. Down came
the rain in a sheet; then flash upon flash gleaming fiercely through
the vapour-laden air; and roar upon roar echoing along the rocky
cavities in volumes of fearful sound. Then another pause and space of
utter silence, followed by a blaze of light that dazed and blinded her,
and suddenly one of the piled-up columns to her left swayed to and fro
like a poplar in a breeze, to fall headlong with a crash which almost
mastered the awful crackling of the thunder overhead and the shrieking
of the baboons scared from their crannies in the cliff. Down it rushed
beneath the stroke of that fiery sword, the brave old pillar that had
lasted out so many centuries, sending clouds of dust and fragments high
up into the blinding rain, and carrying awe and wonder to the heart of
the girl who watched its fall. Away rolled the storm as quickly as it
had come, with a sound like the passing of the artillery of an
embattled host; then a grey rain set in, blotting the outlines of
everything, like an endless absorbing grief, dulling the edge and
temper of a life. Through it Jess, scared and wet to the skin, managed
to climb up the natural steps, now made almost impassable by the
prevailing gloom and the rush of water from the table-top of the
mountain, and on across the sodden plain, down the rocky path on the
farther side, past the little walled-in cemetery with the four red gums
planted at its corners, in which a stranger who had died at Mooifontein
lay buried, and so, just as the darkness of the wet night came down
like a cloud, home at last. At the back-door stood her old uncle with a
lantern.

“Is that you, Jess?” he called out in his stentorian tones. “Lord! what
a sight!” as she emerged, her sodden dress clinging to her slight form,
her hands torn with clambering over the rocks, her curling hair which
had broken loose hanging down her back and half covering her face.

“Lord! what a sight!” he ejaculated again. “Why, Jess, where have you
been? Captain Niel has gone out to look for you with the Kafirs.”

“I have been sketching in Leeuwen Kloof, and got caught in the storm.
There, uncle, let me pass, I want to take these wet things off. It is a
bitter night,” and she ran to her room, leaving a long trail of water
behind her as she passed. The old man entered the house, shut the door,
and blew out the lantern.

“Now, what is it she reminds me of?” he said aloud as he groped his way
down the passage to the sitting-room. “Ah, I know, that night when she
first came here out of the rain leading Bessie by the hand. What can
the girl have been thinking of, not to see the thunder coming up? She
ought to know the signs of the weather here by now. Dreaming, I
suppose, dreaming. She’s an odd woman, Jess, very.” Perhaps he did not
quite know how accurate his guess was, and how true the conclusion he
drew from it. Certainly she had been dreaming, and she was an odd
woman.

Meanwhile Jess was rapidly changing her clothes and removing the traces
of her struggle with the elements. But of that other struggle she had
gone through she could not remove the traces. They and the love that
arose out of it would endure as long as she endured. It was her former
self that had been cast off in it and which now lay behind her, an
empty and unmeaning thing like the shapeless heap of garments. It was
all very strange. So John had gone to look for her and had not found
her. She was glad that he had gone. It made her happy to think of him
searching and calling in the wet and the night. She was only a woman,
and it was natural that she should feel thus. By-and-by he would come
back and find her clothed and in her right mind and ready to greet him.
She was glad that he had not seen her wet and dishevelled. A girl looks
so unpleasant like that. It might have set him against her. Men like
women to look nice and clean and pretty. That gave her an idea. She
turned to her glass and, holding the light above her head, studied her
own face attentively. She was a woman with as little vanity in her
composition as it is possible for a woman to have, and till now she had
not given her personal looks much consideration. They had not been of
great importance to her in the Wakkerstroom district of the Transvaal.
But to-night all of a sudden they became very important; and so she
stood and looked at her own wonderful eyes, at the masses of curling
brown hair still damp and shining from the rain, at the curious pallid
face and clear-cut determined mouth.

“If it were not for my eyes and hair, I should be very ugly,” she said
to herself aloud. “If only I were beautiful like Bessie, now.” The
thought of her sister gave her another idea. What if John were to
prefer Bessie? Now she remembered that he had been very attentive to
Bessie. A feeling of dreadful doubt and jealousy passed through her,
for women like Jess know what jealousy is in its bitterness. Supposing
that it was in vain, supposing that what she had given to-day—given
utterly once and for all, so that she could not take it back—had been
given to a man who loved another woman, and that woman her own dear
sister! Supposing that the fate of her love was to be like water
falling unalteringly on the hard rock that heeds it not and retains it
not! True, the water wears the rock away; but could she be satisfied
with that? She could master him, she knew; even if things were so, she
could win him to herself, she had read it in his eyes that afternoon;
but could she, who had promised to her dead mother to cherish and
protect her sister, whom till this day she had loved better than
anything in the world, and whom she still loved more dearly than her
life—could she, if it should happen to be thus, rob that sister of her
lover? And if it should be so, what would her life be like? It would be
like the great pillar after the lightning had smitten it, a pile of
shattered smoking fragments, a very heaped-up debris of a life. She
could feel it even now. No wonder, then, that Jess sat there upon the
little white bed holding her hand against her heart and feeling
terribly afraid.

Just then she heard John’s footsteps in the hall.

“I can’t find her,” he said in an anxious tone to some one as she rose,
taking her candle with her, and left the room. The light of it fell
full upon his face and dripping clothes. It was white and anxious, and
she was glad to see the anxiety.

“Oh, thank God! here you are!” he said, catching her hand. “I began to
think you were quite lost. I have been right down the Kloof after you,
and got a nasty fall over it.”

“It is very good of you,” she said in a low voice, and again their eyes
met, and again her glance thrilled him. There was such a wonderful
light in Jess’s eyes that night.

Half an hour afterwards they sat down as usual to supper. Bessie did
not put in an appearance till it was a quarter over, and then sat very
silent through it. Jess narrated her adventure in the Kloof, and
everybody listened, but nobody said much. There seemed to be a shadow
over the house that evening, or perhaps it was that each party was
thinking of his own affairs. After supper old Silas Croft began talking
about the political state of the country, which gave him uneasiness. He
said that he believed the Boers really meant to rebel against the
Government this time. Frank Muller had told him so, and he always knew
what was going on. This announcement did not tend to raise anybody’s
spirits, and the evening passed as silently as the meal had done. At
last Bessie got up, stretched her rounded arms, and said that she was
tired and going to bed.

“Come into my room,” she whispered to her sister as she passed. “I want
to speak to you.”




CHAPTER VII.
LOVE’S YOUNG DREAM


After waiting a few minutes, Jess said “Good-night,” and went straight
to Bessie’s room. Her sister had undressed, and was sitting on her bed,
wrapped in a blue dressing-gown that suited her fair complexion
admirably, and with a very desponding expression on her beautiful face.
Bessie was one of those people who are easily elated and easily cast
down.

Jess came up to her and kissed her.

“What is it, love?” she said. And Bessie could never have divined the
gnawing anxiety that was eating at her heart as she said it.

“Oh, Jess, I’m so glad that you have come. I do so want you to advise
me—that is, to tell me what you think,” and she paused.

“You must tell _me_ what it is all about first, Bessie dear,” she said,
sitting down opposite to her in such a position that her face was
shaded from the light. Bessie tapped her naked foot against the matting
with which the little room was carpeted. It was an exceedingly pretty
foot.

“Well, dear old girl, it is just this—Frank Muller has been here to ask
me to marry him.”

“Oh,” said Jess, with a sigh of relief. So that was all? She felt as
though a ton-weight had been lifted from her heart. She had expected
this bit of news for some time.

“He wanted me to marry him, and when I said I would not, he behaved
like—like——”

“Like a Boer,” suggested Jess.

“Like a _brute_,” went on Bessie with emphasis.

“So you don’t care for Frank Muller?”

“Care for him! I loathe the man. You don’t know how I loathe him, with
his handsome bad face and his cruel eyes. I always loathed him, and now
I hate him too. But I will tell you all about it;” and she did, with
many feminine comments and interpolations.

Jess sat quite still, and waited till she had finished.

“Well, dear,” she said at last, “you are not going to marry him, and so
there is an end of it. You can’t detest the man more than I do. I have
watched him for years,” she went on, with rising anger, “and I tell you
that Frank Muller is a liar and a traitor. That man would betray his
own father if he thought it to his interest to do so. He hates uncle—I
am sure he does, although he pretends to be so fond of him. I am
certain that he has tried often and often to stir up the Boers against
him. Old Hans Coetzee told me that he denounced him to the Veld-Cornet
as an _uitlander_ and a _verdomde Engelsmann_ about two years before
the annexation, and tried to get him to persuade the Landrost to report
him as a law-breaker to the Raad; while all the time he was pretending
to be so friendly. Then in the Sikukuni war it was Frank Muller who
caused them to commandeer uncle’s two best waggons and spans. He gave
none himself, nothing but a couple of bags of meal. He is a wicked
fellow, Bessie, and a dangerous fellow; but he has more brains and more
power about him than any man in the Transvaal, and you will have to be
very careful, or he will do us all a bad turn.”

“Ah!” said Bessie; “well, he can’t do much now that the country is
English.”

“I am not so sure of that. I am not so sure that the country is going
to stop English. You laugh at me for reading the home papers, but I see
things there that make me doubtful. The other party is in power now in
England, and one does not know what they may do; you heard what uncle
said to-night. They might give us up to the Boers. You must remember
that we far-away people are only the counters with which they play
their game.”

“Nonsense, Jess,” said Bessie indignantly. “Englishmen are not like
that. When they say a thing, they stick to it.”

“They used to, you mean,” answered Jess with a shrug, and got up from
her chair to go to bed.

Bessie began to fidget her white feet over one another.

“Stop a bit, Jess dear,” she said. “I want to speak to you about
something else.”

Jess sat or rather dropped back into her chair, and her pale face
turned paler than ever; but Bessie blushed very red and hesitated.

“It’s about Captain Niel,” she said at length.

“Oh,” answered Jess with a little laugh, and her voice sounded cold and
strange in her own ears. “Has he been following Frank Muller’s example,
and proposing to you too?”

“No-o,” said Bessie, “but”—and here she rose, and, sitting on a stool
by her elder sister’s chair, rested her forehead against her knee—“but
I love him, and I _believe_ that he loves me. This morning he told me
that I was the prettiest woman he had seen at home or abroad, and the
sweetest too; and do you know,” she said, looking up and giving a happy
little laugh, “I think he meant it.”

“Are you joking, Bessie, or are you really in earnest?”

“In earnest! ah, but that I am, and I am not ashamed to say it. I fell
in love with John Niel when he killed that cock ostrich. He looked so
strong and savage as he fought with it. It is a fine thing to see a man
put out all his strength. And then he is such a gentleman!—so different
from the men we meet round here. Oh yes, I fell in love with him at
once, and I have got deeper and deeper in love with him ever since, and
if he does not marry me I think that it will break my heart. There,
that’s the truth, Jess dear,” and she dropped her golden head on to her
sister’s knees and began to cry softly at the thought.

But the sister sat there on the chair, her hand hanging idly by her
side, her white face set and impassive as that of an Egyptian Sphinx,
and the large eyes gazing far away through the window, against which
the rain was beating—far away out into the night and the storm. She
heard the surging of the storm, she heard her sister’s weeping, her
eyes perceived the dark square of the window through which they
appeared to look, she could feel Bessie’s head upon her knee—yes, she
could see and hear and feel, and yet it seemed to her that she was
_dead_. The lightning had fallen on her soul as it fell on the pillar
of rock, and it was as the pillar is. And it had fallen so soon! there
had been such a little span of happiness and hope! And so she sat, like
a stony Sphinx, and Bessie wept softly before her, like a beautiful,
breathing, loving human suppliant, and the two formed a picture and a
contrast such as the student of human nature does not often get the
chance of studying.

It was the eldest sister who spoke first after all.

“Well, dear,” she said, “what are you crying about? You love Captain
Niel, and you believe that he loves you. Surely there is nothing to cry
about.”

“Well, I don’t know that there is,” said Bessie, more cheerfully; “but
I was thinking how dreadful it would be if I lost him.”

“I do not think that you need be afraid,” said Jess; “and now, dear, I
really must go to bed, I am so tired. Good-night, my dear; God bless
you! I think that you have made a very wise choice. Captain Niel is a
man whom any woman might love, and be proud of loving.”

In another minute she was in her room, and there her composure left
her, for she was but a loving woman after all. She flung herself upon
her bed, and, hiding her face in the pillow, burst into a paroxysm of
weeping—a very different thing from Bessie’s gentle tears. Her grief
absolutely convulsed her, and she pushed the bedclothes against her
mouth to prevent the sound of it penetrating the partition wall and
reaching John Niel’s ears, for his room was next to hers. Even in the
midst of her suffering the thought of the irony of the thing forced
itself into her mind. There, separated from her only by a few inches of
lath and plaster and some four or five feet of space, was the man for
whom she mourned thus, and yet he was as ignorant of it as though he
were thousands of miles away. Sometimes at such acute crises in our
lives the limitations of our physical nature do strike us after this
fashion. It is strange to be so near and yet so far, and it brings the
absolute and utter loneliness of every created being home to the mind
in a manner that is forcible and at times almost terrible. John Niel
sinking composedly to sleep, his mind happy with the recollection of
those two right and left shots, and Jess, lying on her bed, six feet
away, and sobbing out her stormy heart over him, are indeed but types
of what is continually happening in this remarkable world. How often do
we understand one another’s grief? And, when we do, by what standard
can we measure it? More especially is comprehension rare, if we chance
to be the original cause of the trouble. Do we think of the feelings of
the beetles it is our painful duty to crush into nothingness? Not at
all. If we have any compunctions, they are quickly absorbed in the
pride of our capture. And more often still, as in the present case, we
set our foot upon the poor victim by pure accident or venial
carelessness.

Presently John was fast asleep, and Jess, her paroxysm past, was
walking up and down, down and up, her little room, her bare feet
falling noiselessly on the carpeting as she strove to wear out the
first bitterness of her woe. Oh that it lay in her power to recall the
past few days! Oh that she had never seen his face, which must now be
ever before her eyes! But for her there was no such possibility, and
she felt it. She knew her own nature well. Her heart had spoken, and
the word it said must roll on continually through the spaces of her
mind. Who can recall the spoken word, and who can set a limit on its
echoes? It is not so with most women, but here and there may be found a
nature where it is so. Spirits like this poor girl’s are too deep, and
partake too much of a divine immutability, to shift and suit themselves
to the changing circumstances of a fickle world. They have no middle
course; they cannot halt half-way; they set all their fortune on a
throw. And when the throw is lost their hearts are broken, and their
happiness passes away like a swallow.

For in such a nature love rises like the wind on the quiet breast of
some far sea. None can say whence it comes or whither it blows; but
there it is, lashing the waters to a storm, so that they roll in
thunder all the long day through, throwing their white arms on high, as
they clasp at the evasive air, till the darkness that is death comes
down and covers them.

What is the interpretation of it? Why does the great wind stir the deep
waters? It does but ripple the shallow pool as it passes, for
shallowness can but ripple and throw up shadows. We cannot tell, but
this we know—that deep things only can be deeply moved. It is the
penalty of depth and greatness; it is the price they pay for the divine
privilege of suffering and sympathy. The shallow pools, the
looking-glasses of our little life, know nought, feel nought. Poor
things! they can but ripple and reflect. But the deep sea, in its
torture, may perchance catch some echo of God’s voice sounding down the
driven gale; and, as it lifts itself and tosses its waves in agony, may
perceive a glow, flowing from a celestial sky that is set beyond the
horizon that bounds its being.

Suffering, or rather mental suffering, is a prerogative of greatness,
and even here there lies an exquisite joy at its core. For everything
has its compensations. Nerves such as these can thrill with a high
happiness, that will sweep unfelt over the mass of men. Thus he who is
stricken with grief at the sight of the world’s misery—as all great and
good men must be—is at times lifted up with joy by catching some faint
gleam of the almighty purpose that underlies it. So it was with the Son
of Man in His darkest hours; the Spirit that enabled Him to compass out
the measure of the world’s suffering and sin enabled Him also, knowing
their purposes, to gaze beyond them; and thus it is, too, with those
deep-hearted children of His race, who partake, however dimly, of His
divinity.

Thus, even in this hour of her darkest bitterness and grief, a gleam of
comfort struggled to Jess’s breast just as the first ray of dawn was
struggling through the stormy night. She would sacrifice herself to her
sister—that she had determined on; and hence came that cold gleam of
happiness, for there is happiness in self-sacrifice, whatever the
cynical may say. At first her woman’s nature had risen in rebellion
against the thought. Why should she throw her life away? She had as
good a right to this man as Bessie, and she knew that by the strength
of her own hand she could hold him against Bessie in all her beauty,
however far things had gone between them; and she believed, as a
jealous woman is prone to do, that they had gone much farther than was
the case.

But by-and-by, as she pursued that weary march, her better self rose
up, and mastered the promptings of her heart. Bessie loved him, and
Bessie was weaker than she, and less suited to bear pain, and she had
sworn to her dying mother—for Bessie had been her mother’s darling—to
promote her happiness, and, come what would, to comfort and protect her
by every means in her power. It was a wide oath, and she was only a
child when she took it, but it bound her conscience none the less, and
surely it covered this. Besides, she dearly loved her—far, far more
than she loved herself. No, Bessie should have her lover, and she
should never know what it had cost her to give him up; and as for
herself, well, she must go away like a wounded buck, and hide till she
got well—or died.

She laughed a drear little laugh, and stayed to brush her hair just as
the broad lights of the dawn came streaming across the misty veldt. But
she did not look at her face again in the glass; she cared no more
about it now. Then she threw herself down to sleep the sleep of utter
exhaustion before it was time to go out again and face the world and
her new sorrow.

Poor Jess! Love’s young dream had not overshadowed her for long. It had
tarried just three hours. But it had left other dreams behind.

“Uncle,” said Jess that morning to old Silas Croft as he stood by the
kraal-gate, where he had been counting out the sheep—an operation
requiring much quickness of eye, and on the accurate performance of
which he greatly prided himself.

“Yes, yes, my dear, I know what you are going to say. It was very
neatly done; it isn’t everybody who can count out six hundred running
hungry sheep without a mistake. But then, I oughtn’t to say too much,
for you see I have been at it for fifty years, in the old colony and
here. Now, many a man would get fifty sheep wrong. There’s Niel for
instance——”

“Uncle,” said she, wincing a little at the name, as a horse with a sore
back winces at the touch of the saddle, “it wasn’t about the sheep that
I was going to speak to you. I want you to do me a favour.”

“A favour? Why, God bless the girl, how pale you look!—not but what you
are always pale. Well, what is it now?”

“I want to go up to Pretoria by the post-cart that leaves Wakkerstroom
to-morrow afternoon, and to stop for a couple of months with my
schoolfellow, Jane Neville. I have often promised to go, and I have
never gone.”

“Well, I never!” said the old man. “My stay-at-home Jess wanting to go
away, and without Bessie too! What is the matter with you?”

“I want a change, uncle—I do indeed. I hope you won’t thwart me in
this.”

Silas looked at her steadily with his keen grey eyes.

“Humph!” he said; “you want to go away, and there’s an end of it. Best
not ask too many questions where a maid is concerned. Very well, my
dear, go if you like, though I shall miss you.”

“Thank you, uncle,” she said, and kissed him; then turned and went.

Old Croft took off his broad hat and polished his bald head with a red
pocket-handkerchief.

“There’s something up with that girl,” he said aloud to a lizard that
had crept out of the crevices of the stone wall to bask in the sun. “I
am not such a fool as I look, and I say that there is something wrong
with her. She is odder than ever,” and he hit viciously at the lizard
with his stick, whereon it promptly bolted into its crack, returning
presently to see if the irate “human” had departed.

“However,” he soliloquised, as he made his way to the house, “I am glad
that it was not Bessie. I couldn’t bear, at my time of life, to part
with Bessie, even for a couple of months.”




CHAPTER VIII.
JESS GOES TO PRETORIA


That day, at dinner, Jess suddenly announced that she was going on the
morrow to Pretoria to see Jane Neville.

“To see Jane Neville!” said Bessie, opening her blue eyes wide. “Why,
it was only last month you said that you did not care about Jane
Neville now, because she had grown so vulgar. Don’t you remember when
she stopped here on her way down to Natal last year, and held up her
fat hands, and said, ‘Ah, Jess—Jess is a _genius!_ It is a privilege to
know her’? And then she asked you to quote Shakespeare to that lump of
a brother of hers, and you told her that if she did not hold her tongue
she would not enjoy the privilege much longer. And now you want to go
and stop with her for two months! Well, Jess, you are odd. And, what’s
more, I think it is very unkind of you to run away for so long.”

To all of which prattle Jess said nothing, but merely reiterated her
determination to go.

John, too, was astonished, and, to tell the truth, not a little
disgusted. Since the previous day, when he had that talk with her in
Lion Kloof, Jess had assumed a clearer and more definite interest in
his eyes. Before that she was an enigma; now he had guessed enough
about her to make him anxious to know more. Indeed, he had not perhaps
realised how strong and definite his interest was till he heard that
she was going away for a long period. Suddenly it struck him that the
farm would be very dull without this very fascinating woman moving
about the place in her silent, resolute way. Bessie was, no doubt,
delightful and charming to look on, but she had not her sister’s brains
and originality; and John Niel was sufficiently above the ordinary run
to thoroughly appreciate intellect and originality in a woman, instead
of standing aghast at it. She interested him intensely, to say the
least of it, and, man-like, he felt exceedingly annoyed, and even
sulky, at the idea of her departure. He looked at her in protest, and,
with an awkwardness begotten of his irritation, knocked down the
vinegar cruet and made a mess upon the table; but she evaded his eyes
and took no notice of the vinegar. Then, feeling that he had done all
that in him lay, he went to see about the ostriches; first of all
hanging about a little in case Jess should come out, which she did not
do. Indeed, he saw nothing more of her till supper time. Bessie told
him that she said she was busy packing; but, as one can only take
twenty pounds weight of luggage in a post-cart, this did not quite
convince him that it was so in fact.

At supper Jess was, if possible, even more quiet than she had been at
dinner. After it was over, he asked her to sing, but she declined,
saying that she had given up singing for the present, and persisting in
her statement in spite of the chorus of remonstrance it aroused. The
birds only sing whilst they are mating; and it is, by the way, a
curious thing, and suggestive of the theory that the same great
principles pervade all nature, that now when her trouble had overtaken
her, and that she had lost the love which had suddenly sprung from her
heart—full-grown and clad in power as Athena sprang from the head of
Jove—Jess had no further inclination to use her divine gift of song.
Probably it was nothing more than a coincidence, although a strange
one.

The arrangement was, that on the morrow Jess was to be driven in the
Cape cart to Martinus-Wesselstroom, more commonly called Wakkerstroom,
there to catch the post-cart, which was timed to leave the town at
mid-day, though when it would leave was quite another matter.
Post-carts are not particular to a day or so in the Transvaal.

Old Silas Croft was to drive her with Bessie, who wished to do some
shopping in Wakkerstroom, as ladies sometimes will; but at the last
moment the old man felt a premonitory twinge of the rheumatism to which
he was a martyr, and could not go. So, of course, John volunteered,
and, though Jess raised some difficulties, Bessie furthered the idea,
and in the end his offer was accepted.

Accordingly, at half-past eight on a beautiful morning up came the
tented cart, with its two massive wheels, stout stinkwood disselboom,
and four spirited young horses; to the heads of which the Hottentot
Jantje, assisted by the Zulu Mouti, clad in the sweet simplicity of a
moocha, a few feathers in his wool, and a horn snuffbox stuck through
the fleshy part of the ear, hung on grimly. In they got—John first,
then Bessie next to him, then Jess. Next Jantje scrambled up behind;
and after some preliminary backing and plunging, and showing a
disposition to twine themselves affectionately round the orange-trees,
off went the horses at a hand gallop, and away swung the cart after
them, in a fashion that would have frightened anybody, not accustomed
to that mode of progression, pretty well out of his wits. As it was,
John had as much as he could do to keep the four horses together, and
to prevent them from bolting, and this alone, to say nothing of the
rattling and jolting of the vehicle over the uneven track, was
sufficient to put a stop to any attempt at conversation.

Wakkerstroom is about eighteen miles from Mooifontein, a distance that
they covered well within the two hours. Here the horses were outspanned
at the hotel, and John went into the house whence the post-cart was to
start and booked Jess’s seat, and then joined the ladies at the
_Kantoor_ or store where they were shopping. When their purchases were
made, they went back to the inn together and ate some dinner; by which
time the Hottentot driver of the cart began to tune up lustily, but
unmelodiously, on a bugle to inform intending passengers that it was
time to start. Bessie was out of the room at the moment, and, with the
exception of a peculiarly dirty-looking coolie waiter, there was nobody
about.

“How long are you going to be away, Miss Jess?” asked John.

“Two months, more or less, Captain Niel.”

“I am very sorry that you are going,” he said earnestly. “It will be
dull at the farm without you.”

“You will have Bessie to talk to,” she answered, turning her face to
the window, and affecting to watch the inspanning of the post-cart in
the yard on to which it looked.

“Captain Niel!” she said suddenly.

“Yes?”

“Mind you look after Bessie while I am away. Listen! I am going to tell
you something. You know Frank Muller?”

“Yes, I know him, and a very disagreeable fellow he is.”

“Well, he threatened Bessie the other day, and he is a man who is quite
capable of carrying out a threat. I can’t tell you anything more about
it, but I want you to promise me to protect Bessie if any occasion for
it should arise. I do not know that it will, but it might. Will you
promise?”

“Of course I will; I would do a great deal more than that if you asked
me to, Jess,” he answered tenderly, for now that she was going away he
felt curiously drawn towards her, and was anxious to show it.

“Never mind me,” she said, with an impatient little movement. “Bessie
is sweet enough and lovely enough to be looked after for her own sake,
I should think.”

Before he could say any more, in came Bessie herself, saying that the
driver was waiting, and they went out to see her sister off.

“Don’t forget your promise,” Jess whispered to him, bending down as he
helped her into the cart, so low that her lips almost touched him, and
her breath rested for a second on his cheek like the ghost of a kiss.

In another moment the sisters had embraced each other, tenderly enough;
the driver had sounded once more on his awful bugle, and away went the
cart at full gallop, bearing with it Jess, two other passengers, and
her Majesty’s mails. John and Bessie stood for a moment watching its
mad career, as it fled splashing and banging down the straggling street
towards the wide plains beyond; then they turned to enter the inn again
and prepare for their homeward drive. At that moment, an old Boer,
named Hans Coetzee, with whom John was already slightly acquainted,
came up, and, extending an enormously big and thick hand, bid them
“_Gooden daag._” Hans Coetzee was a very favourable specimen of the
better sort of Boer, and really came more or less up to the ideal
picture that is so often drawn of that “simple pastoral people.” He was
a very large, stout man, with a fine open face and a pair of kindly
eyes. John, looking at him, guessed that he could not weigh less than
seventeen stone, and that estimate was well within the mark.

“How are you, Captain?” he said in English, for he could talk English
well, “and how do you like the Transvaal?—must not call it South
African Republic now, you know, for that’s treason,” and his eye
twinkled merrily.

“I like it very much, _Meinheer_,” said John.

“Ah, yes, it’s a beautiful veldt, especially about here—no horse
sickness, no ‘blue tongue,’ [*] and a good strong grass for the cattle.
And you must find yourself very snug at _Oom_ Croft’s there; it’s the
nicest place in the district, with the ostriches and all. Not that I
hold with ostriches in this veldt; they are well enough in the old
colony, but they won’t breed here—at least, not as they should do. I
tried them once and I know; oh, yes, I know.”

[*] A disease that is very fatal to sheep.

“Yes, it’s a very fine country, _Meinheer_. I have been all over the
world almost, and I never saw a finer.”

“You don’t say so, now! Almighty, what a thing it is to have travelled!
Not that I should like to travel myself. I think that the Lord meant us
to stop in the place He has made for us. But it is a fine country, and”
(dropping his voice) “I think it is a finer country than it used to
be.”

“You mean that the veldt has got ‘tame’, _Meinheer_?”

“Nay, nay. I mean that the land is English now,” he answered
mysteriously, “and though I dare not say so among my _volk_, I hope
that it will keep English. When I was Republican, I was Republican, and
it was good in some ways, the Republic. There was so little to pay in
taxes, and we knew how to manage the black folk; but now I am English,
I am English. I know the English Government means good money and
safety, and if there isn’t a _Raad_ (assembly) now, well, what does it
matter? Almighty, how they used to talk there!—clack, clack, clack!
just like an old black _koran_ (species of bustard) at sunset. And
where did they run the waggon of the Republic to—Burghers and those
damned Hollanders of his, and the rest of them? Why, into the
_sluit_—into a _sluit_ with peaty banks; and there it would have
stopped till now, or till the flood came down and swept it away, if old
Shepstone—ah! what a tongue that man has, and how fond he is of the
_kinderchies!_ (little children)—had not come and pulled it out again.
But look here, Captain, the _volk_ round here don’t think like that.
It’s the ‘_verdomde Britische Gouvernment_’ here and the ‘_verdomde
Britische Gouvernment_’ there, and _bymakaars_ (meetings) here and
_bymakaars_ there. Silly folk, they all run one after the other like
sheep. But there it is, Captain, and I tell you there will be fighting
before long, and then our people will shoot those poor _rooibaatjes_ of
yours like buck, and take the land back. Poor things! I could weep when
I think of it.”

John smiled at this melancholy prognostication, and was about to
explain what a poor show all the Boers in the Transvaal would make in
front of a few British regiments, when he was astonished by a sudden
change in his friend’s manner. Dropping his enormous paw on to his
shoulder, Coetzee broke into a burst of somewhat forced merriment, the
cause of which, though John did not guess it at the moment, was that he
had just perceived Frank Muller, who was in Wakkerstroom with a
waggon-load of corn to grind at the mill, standing within five yards,
and apparently intensely interested in flipping at the flies with a
cowrie made of the tail of a vilderbeeste, but in reality listening to
Coetzee’s talk with all his ears.

“Ha, ha! _nef_ (nephew),” said old Coetzee to the astonished John, “no
wonder you like Mooifontein—there are other _mooi_ (pretty) things
there beside the water. How often do you _opsit_ (sit up at night) with
Uncle Croft’s pretty girl, eh? I’m not quite as blind as an ant-bear
yet. I saw her blush when you spoke to her just now. I saw her. Well,
well, it is a pretty game for a young man, isn’t it, _nef_ Frank?”
(this was addressed to Muller). “I’ll be bound the Captain here ‘burns
a long candle’ with pretty Bessie every night, eh, Frank? I hope you
ain’t jealous, _nef_? My _vrouw_ told me some time ago that you were
sweet in that direction yourself;” and he stopped at last, out of
breath, looking anxiously towards Muller for an answer, while John, who
had been somewhat overwhelmed at this flood of bucolic chaff, gave a
sigh of relief. As for Muller, he behaved in a curious manner. Instead
of laughing, as the jolly old Boer had intended that he should,
although Coetzee could not see it, his face had been growing blacker
and blacker; and now that the flow of language ceased, with a savage
ejaculation which John could not catch, but which he appeared to throw
at his (John’s) head, he turned on his heel and went off towards the
courtyard of the inn.

“Almighty!” said old Hans, wiping his face with a red cotton
pocket-handkerchief; “I have put my foot into a big hole. That
stink-cat Muller heard all that I was saying to you, and I tell you he
will save it up and save it up, and one day he will bring it all out to
the _volk_, and call me a traitor to the ‘land’ and ruin me. I know
him. He knows how to balance a long stick on his little finger so that
the ends keep even. Oh, yes, he can ride two horses at once, and blow
hot and blow cold. He is a devil of a man, a devil of a man! And what
did he mean by swearing at you like that? Is it about the _missie_
(girl), I wonder? Almighty! who can say? Ah! that reminds me—though I’m
sure I don’t know why it should—the Kafirs tell me that there is a big
herd of buck—vilderbeeste and blesbok—on my outlying place about an
hour and a half (ten miles) from Mooifontein. Can you hold a rifle,
Captain? You look like a bit of a hunter.”

“Oh, yes, Meinheer!” said John, delighted at the prospect of some
shooting.

“Ah, I thought so. All you English are sportsmen, though you don’t know
how to kill buck. Well now, you take _Oom_ Croft’s light Scotch cart
and two good horses, and come over to my place—not to-morrow, for my
wife’s cousin is coming to see us, and an old cat she is, but rich; she
has a thousand pounds in gold in the waggon-box under her bed—nor the
next day, for it is the Lord’s day, and one can’t shoot creatures on
the Lord’s day—but Monday, yes, Monday. You will be there by eight
o’clock, and you shall see how to kill vilderbeeste. Almighty! now what
can that jackal Frank Muller have meant? Ah! he is the devil of a man,”
and, shaking his head ponderously, the jolly old Boer departed, and
presently John saw him riding away upon a fat little shooting-pony
which cannot have weighed much more than himself, but that cantered off
with him on his fifteen-mile journey as though he were a
feather-weight.




CHAPTER IX.
JANTJE’S STORY


Shortly after the old Boer had gone, John went into the yard of the
hotel to see to the inspanning of the Cape cart, where his attention
was at once arrested by the sight of a row in active progress—at least,
from the crowd of Kafirs and idlers and the angry sounds and curses
which proceeded from them, he judged that it was a row. Nor was he
wrong in his conclusion. In the corner of the yard, close by the
stable-door, surrounded by the aforesaid crowd, stood Frank Muller; a
heavy _sjambock_ in his raised hand, as though in the act to strike.
Before him, a very picture of drunken fury, his lips drawn up like a
snarling dog’s, so that the two lines of white teeth gleamed like
polished ivory in the sunlight, his small eyes all shot with blood and
his face working convulsively, was the Hottentot Jantje. Nor was this
all. Across his face was a blue wheal where the whip had fallen, and in
his hand a heavy white-handled knife which he always carried.

“Hullo! what is all this?” said John, shouldering his way through the
crowd.

“The _swartsel_ (black creature) has stolen my horse’s forage, and
given it to yours!” shouted Muller, who was evidently almost off his
head with rage, making an attempt to hit Jantje with the whip as he
spoke. The latter avoided the blow by jumping behind John, with the
result that the tip of the _sjambock_ caught the Englishman on the leg.

“Be careful, sir, with that whip,” said John to Muller, restraining his
temper with difficulty. “Now, how do you know that the man stole your
horse’s forage; and what business have you to touch him? If there was
anything wrong, you should have reported it to me.”

“He lies, Baas, he lies!” yelled out the Hottentot in tremulous,
high-pitched tones. “He lies; he has always been a liar, and worse than
a liar. Yah! yah! I can tell things about him. The land is English now,
and Boers can’t kill the black people as they like. That man—that Boer,
Muller, he shot my father and my mother—my father first, then my
mother; he gave her two bullets—she did not die the first time.”

“You yellow devil!—You black-skinned, black-hearted, lying son of
Satan!” roared the great Boer, his very beard curling with fury. “Is
that the way you talk to your masters? Out of the light,
_rooibaatje_”—this was to John—“and I will cut his tongue out of him.
I’ll show him how we deal with a yellow liar;” and without further ado
he made a rush for the Hottentot.

As he came, John, whose blood was now thoroughly up, put out his open
hand, and, bending forward, pushed with all his strength on Muller’s
advancing chest. John was a very powerfully made man, though not a
large one, and the push sent Muller staggering back.

“What do you mean by that, _rooibaatje?_” shouted Muller, his face
livid with fury. “Get out of my road or I will mark that pretty face of
yours. I owe you for some goods as it is, Englishman, and I always pay
my debts. Out of the path, curse you!” and he again rushed for the
Hottentot.

This time John, who was now almost as angry as his assailant, did not
wait for the man to reach him, but, springing forward, hooked his arm
around Muller’s throat and, before he could close with him, with one
tremendous jerk managed not only to stop his wild career, but to
reverse the motion, and then, by interposing his foot with considerable
neatness, to land him—powerful as he was—on his back in a pool of
drainage that had collected from the stable in a hollow of the
inn-yard. Down he went with a splash, amid a shout of delight from the
crowd, who always like to see an aggressor laid low, his head bumping
with considerable force against the lintel of the door. For a moment he
lay still, and John was afraid that the man was really hurt. Presently,
however, he rose, and, without attempting any further hostile
demonstration or saying a single word, tramped off towards the house,
leaving his enemy to compose his ruffled nerves as best he could. Now
John, like most gentlemen, hated a row with all his heart, though he
had the Anglo-Saxon tendency to go through with it unflinchingly when
once it began. Indeed, the incident irritated him almost beyond
bearing, for he knew that the story with additions would go the round
of the countryside, and what is more, that he had made a powerful and
implacable enemy.

“This is all your fault, you drunken little blackguard!” he said,
turning savagely on the Tottie, who, now that his excitement had left
him, was snivelling and drivelling in an intoxicated fashion, and
calling him his preserver and his Baas in maudlin accents.

“He hit me, Baas; he hit me, and I did not take the forage. He is a bad
man, Baas Muller.”

“Be off with you and get the horses inspanned; you are half-drunk,”
John growled, and, having seen that operation advancing to a
conclusion, he went to the sitting-room of the hotel, where Bessie was
waiting in happy ignorance of the disturbance. It was not till they
were well on their homeward way that he told her what had passed,
whereat, remembering the scene she had herself gone through with Frank
Muller, and the threats that he had then made use of, she looked very
grave. Her old uncle, too, was very much put out when he heard the
story on their arrival home that evening.

“You have made an enemy, Niel,” he said, as they sat upon the verandah
after breakfast on the following morning, “and a bad one. Not but what
you were right to stand up for the Hottentot. I would have done as much
myself had I been there and ten years younger, but Frank Muller is not
the man to forget being put upon his back before a lot of Kafirs and
white folk too. Perhaps that Jantje is sober by now. I will go and call
him, and we will hear what this story is about his father and his
mother.”

Presently he returned followed by the ragged, dirty-faced little
Hottentot, who, looking very miserable and ashamed of himself, took off
his hat and squatted down on the drive, in the full glare of the
African sun, to the effects of which he appeared to be totally
impervious.

“Now, Jantje, listen to me,” said the old man. “Yesterday you got drunk
again. Well, I’m not going to talk about that now, except to say that
if I hear of your being drunk once more—you leave this place.”

“Yes, Baas,” said the Hottentot meekly. “I was drunk, though not very;
I only had half a bottle of Cape smoke.”

“By getting drunk you made a quarrel with Baas Muller, so that blows
passed between Baas Muller and the Baas here on your account, which was
more than you are worth. Now when Baas Muller had struck you, you said
that he had shot your father and your mother. Was that a lie, or what
did you mean by saying it?”

“It was no lie, Baas,” answered the Hottentot excitedly. “I have said
it once, and I will say it again. Listen, Baas, and I will tell you the
story. When I was young—so tall”—and he held his hand high enough to
indicate a Tottie of about fourteen years of age—“we, that is, my
father, my mother, my uncle—a very old man, older than the Baas”
(pointing to Silas Croft)—“were _bijwoners_ (authorised squatters) on a
place belonging to old Jacob Muller, Baas Frank’s father, down in
Lydenburg yonder. It was a bush-veldt farm, and old Jacob used to come
down there with his cattle from the High veldt in the winter when there
was no grass in the High veldt, and with him came the Englishwoman, his
wife, and the young Baas Frank—the Baas we saw yesterday.”

“How long was all this ago?” asked Mr. Croft.

Jantje counted on his fingers for some seconds, and then held up his
hand and opened it four times in succession. “So,” he said, “twenty
years last winter. Baas Frank was young then, he had only a little down
upon his chin. One year when _Oom_ Jacob went away, after the first
rains, he left six oxen that were too _poor_ (thin) to go, with my
father, and told him to look after them as though they were his
children. But the oxen were bewitched. Three of them took the lung-sick
and died, a lion got one, a snake got one, and one ate ‘tulip’ and died
too. So when _Oom_ Jacob came back the next year all the oxen were
gone. He was very angry with my father, and beat him with a yoke-strap
till he was all blood, and though we showed him the bones of the oxen,
he said that we had stolen them and sold them.

“Now _Oom_ Jacob had a beautiful span of black oxen that he loved like
children. Sixteen of them there were, and they would come up to the
yoke when he called them and put down their heads of themselves. They
were tame as dogs. These oxen were thin when they came down, but in two
months they grew fat and began to want to trek about as oxen do. At
this time there was a Basutu, one of Sequati’s people, resting in our
hut, for he had hurt his foot with a thorn. When _Oom_ Jacob found that
the Basutu was there he was very angry, for he said that all Basutus
were thieves. So my father told the Basutu that the Baas said that he
must go away, and he went that night. Next morning the span of black
oxen were gone too. The kraal-gate was down, and they had gone. We
hunted all day, but we could not find them. Then _Oom_ Jacob went mad
with rage, and the young Baas Frank told him that one of the Kafir boys
had said to him that he had heard my father sell them to the Basutu for
sheep which he was to pay to us in the summer. It was a lie, but Baas
Frank hated my father because of something about a woman—a Zulu girl.

“Next morning when we were asleep, just at daybreak, _Oom_ Jacob Muller
and Baas Frank and two Kafirs came into the hut and pulled us out, the
old man my uncle, my father, my mother, and myself, and tied us up to
four mimosa-trees with buffalo-hide reims. Then the Kafirs went away,
and _Oom_ Jacob asked my father where the cattle were, and my father
told him that he did not know. Then _Oom_ Jacob took off his hat and
said a prayer to the Big Man in the sky, and when he had done Baas
Frank came up with a gun and stood quite close and shot my father dead,
and he fell forward and hung quiet over the reim, his head touching his
feet. Then he loaded the gun again and shot the old man my uncle, and
he slipped down dead, and his hands stuck up in the air against the
reim. Next he shot my mother, but the bullet did not kill her, and cut
the reim, and she ran away, and he ran after her and killed her. When
that was done he came back to shoot me; but I was young then, and did
not know that it is better to be dead than to live like a dog, and I
cried and prayed for mercy while he was loading the gun.

“But the Baas only laughed, and said he would teach Hottentots how to
steal cattle, and old _Oom_ Jacob prayed out loud to the Big Man and
said he was very sorry for me, but it was the dear Lord’s will. And
then, just as Baas Frank lifted the gun, he dropped it again, for
there, coming softly, softly over the brow of the hill, in and out
between the bushes, were all the sixteen oxen! They had got out in the
night and strayed away into some kloof for a change of pasture, and
came back when they were full and tired of being alone. _Oom_ Jacob
turned quite white and scratched his head, and then fell upon his knees
and thanked the dear Lord for saving my life; and just then the
Englishwoman, Baas Frank’s mother, came down from the waggon to see
what the firing was at, and when she saw all the people dead and me
weeping, tied to the tree, and learnt what it was about, she went quite
mad, for sometimes she had a kind heart when she was not drunk, and
said that a curse would fall on them, and that they would all die in
blood. And she took a knife and cut me loose, though Baas Frank wanted
to kill me, so that I might tell no tales; and I ran away, travelling
by night and hiding by day, for I was very much frightened, till I
reached Natal, and there I stopped, working in Natal till this land
became English, when Baas Croft hired me to drive his cart up from
Maritzburg; and living by here I found Baas Frank, looking bigger but
just the same except for his beard.

“There, Baas, that is the truth, and all the truth, and that is why I
hate Baas Frank, because he shot my father and mother, and why Baas
Frank hates me, because he cannot forget that he did it and because I
saw him do it, for, as our people say, ‘one always hates a man one has
wounded with a spear.’”

Having finished his narrative, the miserable-looking little man picked
up his greasy old felt hat that had a leather strap fixed round the
crown, in which were stuck a couple of frayed ostrich feathers, and
jammed it down over his ears. Then he fell to drawing circles on the
soil with his long toes. His auditors only looked at one another. Such
a ghastly tale seemed to be beyond comment. They never doubted its
truth; the man’s way of telling it carried conviction with it; indeed,
two of them at any rate had heard such stories before. Most people have
who live in the wilder parts of South Africa, though they are not all
to be taken for gospel.

“You say,” remarked old Silas at last, “that the Englishwoman said that
a curse would fall on them, and that they would die in blood? She was
right. Twelve years ago _Oom_ Jacob and his wife were murdered by a
party of Mapoch’s Kafirs down on the edge of that very Lydenburg veldt.
There was a great noise about it at the time, I remember, but nothing
came of it. Baas Frank was not there. He was away shooting buck, so he
escaped, and inherited all his father’s farms and cattle, and came to
live here.”

“So!” said the Hottentot, without showing the slightest interest or
surprise. “I knew it would be so, but I wish I had been there to see
it. I saw that there was a devil in the woman, and that they would die
as she said. When there is a devil in people they always speak the
truth, because they can’t help it. Look, Baas, I draw a circle in the
sand with my foot, and I say some words so, and at last the ends touch.
There, that is the circle of _Oom_ Jacob and his wife the Englishwoman.
The ends have touched and they are dead. An old witch-doctor taught me
how to draw the circle of a man’s life and what words to say. And now I
draw another of Baas Frank. Ah! there is a stone sticking up in the
way. The ends will not touch. But now I work and work and work with my
foot, and say the words and say the words, and so—the stone comes up
and the ends touch now. Thus it is with Baas Frank. One day the stone
will come up and the ends will touch, and he too will die in blood. The
devil in the Englishwoman said so, and devils cannot lie or speak half
the truth only. And now, look, I rub my foot over the circles and they
are gone, and there is only the path again. That means that when they
have died in blood they will be quite forgotten and stamped out. Even
their graves will be flat,” and Jantje wrinkled up his yellow face into
a smile, or rather a grin, and then added in a matter-of-fact way:

“Does the Baas wish the grey mare to have one bundle of green forage or
two?”




CHAPTER X.
JOHN HAS AN ESCAPE


On the following Monday, John, taking Jantje to drive him, departed in
a rough Scotch cart, to which were harnessed two of the best horses at
Mooifontein, to shoot buck at Hans Coetzee’s.

He reached the place at about half-past eight, and concluded, from the
fact of the presence of several carts and horses, that he was not the
only guest. Indeed, the first person whom he saw as the cart pulled up
was his late enemy, Frank Muller.

“_Kek_ (look), Baas,” said Jantje, “there is Baas Frank talking to his
servant Hendrik, that ugly Basutu with one eye.”

John, as may be imagined, was not best pleased at this meeting. He had
always disliked the man, and since Muller’s conduct on the previous
Friday, and Jantje’s story of the dark deed of blood in which he had
been the principal actor, positively he loathed the sight of him. He
jumped out of the cart, and was going to walk round to the back of the
house in order to avoid him, when Muller, suddenly seeming to become
aware of his presence, advanced to meet him with the utmost cordiality.

“How do you do, Captain?” he said, holding out his hand, which John
just touched. “So you have come to shoot buck with _Oom_ Coetzee; going
to show us Transvaalers how do to it, eh? There, Captain, don’t look as
stiff as a rifle barrel. I know what you are thinking of; that little
business at Wakkerstroom on Friday, is it not? Well, now, I tell you
what it is, I was in the wrong, and I am not afraid to say so as
between man and man. I had had a glass, that was the fact, and did not
quite know what I was about. We have got to live as neighbours here, so
let us forget all about it and be brothers again. I never bear malice,
not I. It is not the Lord’s will that we should bear malice. Hit out
from the shoulder, I say, and then forget all about it. If it hadn’t
been for that little monkey,” he added, jerking his thumb in the
direction of Jantje, who was holding the horses’ heads, “it would never
have happened, and it is not nice that two Christians should quarrel
about such as he.”

Muller jerked out this long speech in a succession of sentences,
something as a schoolboy repeats a hardly learnt lesson, fidgeting his
feet and letting his restless eyes travel about the ground as he spoke.
It was evident to John, who stood quite still and listened to it in icy
silence, that his address was by no means extemporary; clearly it had
been composed for the occasion.

“I do not wish to quarrel with anybody, _Meinheer_ Muller,” he answered
at length. “I never do quarrel unless it is forced on me, and then,” he
added grimly, “I do my best to make it unpleasant for my enemy. The
other day you attacked first my servant and then myself. I am glad that
you now see that this was an improper thing to do, and, so far as I am
concerned, there is an end of the matter,” and he turned to enter the
house.

Muller accompanied him as far as where Jantje was standing at the
horses’ heads. Here he stopped, and, putting his hand in his pocket,
took out a two-shilling piece and threw it to the Hottentot, calling to
him to catch it.

Jantje was holding the horses with one hand. In the other he held his
stick—a long walking kerrie that he always carried, the same on which
he had shown Bessie the notches. In order to secure the piece of money
he dropped the stick, and Muller’s quick eye catching sight of the
notches beneath the knob, he stooped down, picked it up, and examined
it.

“What do these mean, boy?” he asked, pointing to the line of big and
little notches, some of which had evidently been cut years ago.

Jantje touched his hat, spat upon the “Scotchman,” as the natives of
that part of Africa call a two-shilling piece,[*] and pocketed it
before he answered. The fact that the giver had murdered all his near
relations did not make the gift less desirable in his eyes. Hottentot
moral sense is not very elevated.

[*] Because once upon a time a Scotchman made a great impression on the
simple native mind in Natal by palming off some thousands of florins
among them at the nominal value of half a crown.


“No, Baas,” he said with a curious grin, “that is how I reckon. If
anybody beats Jantje, Jantje cuts a notch upon the stick, and every
night before he goes to sleep he looks at it and says, ‘One day you
will strike that man twice who struck you once,’ and so on, Baas. Look,
what a line of them there are, Baas. One day I shall pay them all back
again, Baas Frank.”

Muller abruptly dropped the stick, and followed John towards the house.
It was a much better building than the Boers generally indulge in, and
the sitting-room, though innocent of flooring—unless clay and cowdung
mixed can be called a floor—was more or less covered with mats made of
springbuck skins. In the centre of the room stood a table made of the
pretty _buckenhout_ wood, which has the appearance of having been
industriously pricked all over with a darning-needle, and round it were
chairs and couches of stinkwood, and seated with rimpis or strips of
hide.

In one big chair at the end of the room, busily employed in doing
nothing, sat _Tanta_ (Aunt) Coetzee, the wife of Old Hans, a large and
weighty woman, who evidently had once been rather handsome; and on the
couches were some half-dozen Boers, their rifles in their hands or
between their knees.

It struck John as he entered that some of these did not seem best
pleased to see him, and he thought he heard one young fellow, with a
hang-dog expression of face, mutter something about the “damned
Englishman” to his neighbour rather more loudly than was necessary to
convey his sentiments. However, old Coetzee came forward to greet him
heartily enough, and called to his daughters—two fine girls, very
smartly dressed for Dutch women—to give the Captain a cup of coffee.
Then John made the rounds after the Boer fashion, and beginning with
the old lady in the chair, received a lymphatic shake of the hand from
every single soul in the room. They did not rise—it is not customary to
do so—they merely extended their paws, all of them more or less damp,
and muttered the mystic monosyllable “_Daag_,” short for good-day. It
is a very trying ceremony till one gets used to it, and John pulled up
panting, to be presented with a cup of hot coffee that he did not want,
but which it would be rude not to drink.

“The Captain is the _rooibaatje?_” said the old lady “Aunt” Coetzee
interrogatively, and yet with the certainty of one who states a fact.

John signified that he was.

“What does the Captain come to the ‘land’ for? Is it to spy?”

The whole audience listened attentively to their hostess’s question,
then turned their heads to listen for the answer.

“No. I have come to farm with Silas Croft.”

There was a general smile of incredulity. Could a _rooibaatje_ farm?
Certainly not.

“There are three thousand men in the British army,” announced the old
_vrouw_ oracularly, and casting a severe glance at the wolf in sheep’s
clothing, the man of blood who pretended to farm.

Everybody looked at John again, and awaited his answer in dead silence.

“There are more than a hundred thousand men in the regular British
army, and as many more in the Indian army, and twice as many more
volunteers,” he said, in a rather irritated voice.

This statement also was received with the most discouraging
incredulity.

“There are three thousand men in the British army,” repeated the old
lady, in a tone of certainty that was positively crushing.

“Yah, yah!” chimed in some of the younger men in chorus.

“There are three thousand men in the British army,” she repeated for
the third time in triumph. “If the Captain says that there are more he
lies. It is natural that he should lie about his own army. My
grandfather’s brother was at Cape Town in the time of Governor Smith,
and he saw the whole British army. He counted them; there were exactly
three thousand. I say that there are three thousand men in the British
army.”

“Yah, yah!” said the chorus; and John gazed at this terrible person in
bland exasperation.

“How many men do you command in the British army?” she interrogated
after a solemn pause.

“A hundred,” said John sharply.

“Girl,” said the old woman, addressing one of her daughters, “you have
been to school and can reckon. How many times does one hundred go into
three thousand?”

The young lady addressed giggled confusedly, and looked for assistance
to a sardonic Boer whom she was going to marry, who shook his head
sadly, indicating thereby that these were mysteries into which it was
not well to pry. Thrown on her own resources, she plunged into the
recesses of an intricate calculation, in which her fingers played a
considerable part, and finally, with an air of triumph, announced that
it went twenty-six times exactly.

“Yah, yah!” said the chorus, “it goes twenty-six times exactly.”

“The Captain,” said the oracular old lady, who was rapidly driving John
mad, “commands a twenty-sixth part of the British army, and he says
that he comes here to farm with Uncle Silas Croft. He says,” she went
on, with withering contempt, “that he comes here to farm when he
commands a twenty-sixth part of the British army. It is evident that he
lies.”

“Yah, yah!” said the chorus.

“It is natural that he should lie!” she continued; “all Englishmen lie,
especially the _rooibaatje_ Englishmen, but he should not lie so badly.
It must vex the dear Lord to hear a man lie so badly, even though he be
an Englishman and a _rooibaatje_.”

At this point John burst from the house, and swore frantically to
himself as soon as he was outside. It is to be hoped that he was
forgiven, for the provocation was not small. It is not pleasant to be
universally set down not only as a _leugenaar_ (liar), but as one of
the very feeblest order.

In another minute old Hans Coetzee came out and patted him warmly on
the shoulder, in a way that seemed to say that, whatever others might
think of the insufficiency of his powers of falsehood, he, for one,
quite appreciated them, and announced that it was time to be moving.

Accordingly the party climbed into their carts or on to their
shooting-horses, as the case might be, and started. Frank Muller, John
noticed, was mounted as usual on his fine black horse. After driving
for more than half an hour along an indefinite kind of waggon track,
the leading cart, in which were old Hans Coetzee himself, a Malay
driver, and a coloured Cape boy, turned to the left across the open
veldt, and the others followed in turn. This went on for some time,
till at last they reached the crest of a rise that commanded a large
sweep of open country, and here Hans halted and held up his hand,
whereon the others halted too. On looking out over the vast plain
before him John discovered the reason. About half a mile beneath them
was a great herd of blesbuck feeding, three hundred or more of them,
and beyond them another herd of some sixty or seventy much larger and
wilder-looking animals with white tails, which John at once recognised
as vilderbeeste. Nearer to them again, dotted about here and there on
the plain, were a couple of dozen or so of graceful yellow springbuck.

Now a council of war was held, which resulted in the men on
horseback—among whom was Frank Muller—being despatched to circumvent
the herds and drive them towards the carts, that took up their stations
at various points, towards which the buck were likely to run.

Then came a pause of a quarter of an hour or so, till suddenly, from
the far ridge of the opposite slope, John saw a couple of puffs of
white smoke float up into the air, and one of the vilderbeeste below
rolled over on his back, kicking and plunging furiously. Thereon the
whole herd of buck turned and came thundering towards them, stretched
in a long line across the wide veldt; the springbuck first, then the
blesbuck, looking for all the world like a herd of great bearded goats,
owing to their peculiar habit of holding their long heads down as they
galloped. Behind and mixed up with them were the vilderbeeste, who
twisted and turned, and jumped into the air as though they had gone
clean off their heads and were next second going clean on to them. It
is very difficult, owing to his extraordinary method of progression, to
distinguish one part of a galloping vilderbeeste from another; now it
is his horns, now his tail, and now his hoofs that present themselves
to the watcher’s bewildered vision, and now again they all seem to be
mixed up together. On came the great herd, making the ground shake
beneath their footfall: and after them galloped the mounted Boers, from
time to time jumping off their horses to fire a shot into the line of
game, which generally resulted in some poor animal being left sprawling
on the ground, whereon the sportsmen would remount and continue the
chase.

Presently the buck were within range of some of the guns in the carts,
and a regular fusillade began. About twenty blesbuck turned and came
straight past John, at a distance of forty yards. Springing to the
ground he fired both barrels of his “Express” at them as they tore
along—alas and alas! without touching them. The first bullet struck
under their bellies, the second must have shaved their backs. Reloading
rapidly, he fired again at about two hundred yards’ range, and this
time one fell to his second barrel. But he knew that it was a chance
shot: he had fired at the last buck, and he had killed one ten paces in
front of it. In fact this sort of shooting is extremely difficult till
the sportsman understands it. The inexperienced hand firing across a
line of buck will not kill once in twenty shots, as an infinitesimal
difference in elevation, or the slightest error in judging distance—in
itself no easy art on those great plains—will spoil his aim. A Boer
almost invariably gets immediately behind a herd of running buck, and
fires at one about half-way down the line. Consequently if his
elevation is a little wrong, or if he has misjudged his sighting, the
odds are that he will hit one either in front of or behind the
particular animal fired at. All that is necessary is that the line of
fire should be good. This John soon learnt, and when he had mastered
the fact he became as good a game shot as the majority of Boers, but it
being his first attempt, much to his vexation, he did not particularly
distinguish himself that day, with the result that his friends the
Dutchmen went home firmly convinced that the English _rooibaatje_ shot
as indifferently as he lied.

Jumping into the cart again, and leaving the dead blesbuck to look
after itself for the present—not a very safe thing to do in a country
where there are so many vultures—John, or rather Jantje, put the horses
into a gallop, and away they went at full tear. It was a most exciting
mode of progression, bumping along furiously with a loaded rifle in his
hands over a plain on which antheaps as large as an armchair were
scattered like burnt almonds on a cake. Then there were the antbear
holes to reckon with, and the little swamps in the hollows, and other
agreeable surprises. But the rush and exhilaration of the thing were
too great to allow him much time to think of his neck, so away they
flew, hanging on to the cart as best they could, and trusting to
Providence to save them from complete disaster. Now they were bounding
over an antheap, now one of the horses was on his nose, but somehow
they always escaped the last dire catastrophe, thanks chiefly to the
little Hottentot’s skilful driving.

Whenever the game was within range they pulled up, and John would
spring from the cart and let drive, then jump in and follow on again.
This went on for nearly an hour, in which time he had fired
twenty-seven cartridges and killed three blesbuck and wounded a
vilderbeeste, which they proceeded to chase. But the vilderbeeste was
struck in the rump, and an antelope so wounded will travel far, and go
very fast also, so that some miles of ground had been covered before it
began to rest, only to start on again as they drew near. At last, on
crossing the crest of a little rise, John saw what at first he took to
be his vilderbeeste, dead. A second look, however, showed him that,
although it was a dead vilderbeeste, most undoubtedly it was not the
one which he had wounded, for that animal was standing, its head
hanging, about one hundred and twenty yards beyond the other buck,
which, no doubt, had fallen to somebody else’s rifle, or else had been
hit farther back and come here to die. Now this vilderbeeste lay within
a hundred yards of them, and Jantje pointed out to John that his best
plan would be to get out of the cart and creep on his hands and knees
up to the dead animal, from the cover of which he would get a good shot
at his own wounded bull.

Accordingly Jantje having withdrawn with the cart and horses out of
sight under the shelter of the rise, John crouched upon his hands and
knees and proceeded to carry out his stalk. All went well till he was
quite close to the dead cow, and was congratulating himself on the
prospect of an excellent shot at the wounded bull, when suddenly
something struck the ground violently just beneath his body, throwing
up a cloud of earth and dust. He stopped amazed, and at that instant
heard the report of a rifle somewhat to his right and knew that a
bullet had passed beneath him. Scarcely had he realised this when there
was a sudden commotion in his hair, and the soft black felt hat that he
was wearing started from his head, apparently of its own accord, and,
after twirling round twice or thrice in the air, fell gently to the
earth, just as the sound of a second report reached his ears. It was
now evident that somebody was firing at him; so, jumping up from his
crouching position, John tossed his arms into the air and sprang and
shouted in a way that left no mistake as to his whereabouts. In another
minute he saw a man on horseback, cantering easily towards him, in whom
he had little difficulty in recognising Frank Muller. He picked up his
hat; there was a bullet-hole right through it. Then, full of wrath, he
advanced to meet Frank Muller.

“What the devil do you mean by firing at me?” he asked.

“_Allemachter, carle!_” (Almighty, my dear fellow) was the cool answer,
“I thought that you were a vilderbeeste calf. I galloped the cow and
killed her, and she had a calf with her, and when I got the cartridges
out of my rifle—for one stuck and took me some time—and the new ones
in, I looked up, and there, as I thought, was the calf. So I got my
rifle on and let drive, first with one barrel and then with the other,
and when I saw you jump up like that and shout, and that I had been
firing at a man, I nearly fainted. Thank the Almighty I did not hit
you.”

John listened coldly. “I suppose that I am bound to believe you,
_Meinheer_ Muller,” he said. “But I have been told that you have the
most wonderful sight of any man in these parts, which makes it odd that
at three hundred yards you should mistake a man upon his hands and
knees for a vilderbeeste calf.”

“Does the Captain think, then, that I wished to murder him;
especially,” he added, “after I shook his hand this morning?”

“I don’t know what I think,” answered John, looking straight into
Muller’s eyes, which fell before his own. “All I know is that your
curious mistake very nearly cost me my life. Look here!” and he took a
lock of his brown hair out of the crown of his perforated hat and
showed it to the other.

“Ay, it was very close. Let us thank God that you escaped.”

“It could not well have been closer, _Meinheer_. I hope that, for your
own sake and for the sake of the people who go out shooting with you,
you will not make such a mistake again. Good-morning!”

The handsome Boer, or Anglo-Boer, sat on his horse stroking his
beautiful beard and gazing curiously after John Niel’s sturdy
English-looking figure as he marched towards the cart, for, of course,
the wounded vilderbeeste had long ago vanished.

“I wonder,” he said to himself aloud, as he turned his horse’s head and
rode leisurely away, “if the old _volk_ are right after all, and if
there is a God.” Frank Muller was sufficiently impregnated with modern
ideas to be a free-thinker. “It almost seems like it,” he went on,
“else how did it come that the one bullet passed under his belly and
the other just touched his head without harming him? I aimed carefully
enough too, and I could make the shot nineteen times out of twenty and
not miss. Bah, a God! I snap my fingers at Him. Chance is the only god.
Chance blows men about like the dead grass, till death comes down like
the veldt fire and devours them. But there are men who ride chance as
one rides a young colt—ay, who turn its headlong rushing and rearing to
their own ends—who let it fly hither and thither till it is weary, and
then canter it along the road that leads to triumph. I, Frank Muller,
am one of those men. I never fail in the end. I will kill that
Englishman. Perhaps I will kill old Silas Croft and the Hottentot too.
Bah! they do not know what is coming. I know; I have helped to lay the
mine; and unless they bend to my will I shall be the one to fire it. I
will kill them all, and I will take Mooifontein, and then I will marry
Bessie. She will fight against it, but that will make it all the
sweeter. She loves that _rooibaatje_; I know it; and I will kiss her
over his dead body. Ah! there are the carts. I don’t see the Captain.
Driven home, I suppose, on account of the shock to his nerves. Well, I
must talk to those fools. Lord, what fools they are with their chatter
about the ‘land,’ and the ‘_verdomde Britische Gouvernment_.’ They
don’t know what is good for them. Silly sheep, with Frank Muller for a
shepherd! Ay, and they shall have Frank Muller for a president one day,
and I will rule them too. Bah! I hate the English; but I am glad that I
am half English for all that, for that is where I get the brains! But
these people—fools, fools! Well, I shall pipe and they shall dance!”

“Baas,” said Jantje to John, as they were driving homewards, “Baas
Frank shot at you.”

“How do you know that?” asked John.

“I saw him. He was stalking the wounded bull, and not looking for a
calf at all. There was no calf. He was just going to fire at the
wounded bull when he turned and saw you, and he knelt down on one knee
and covered you, and before I could do anything he fired, and then when
he saw that he had missed you he fired again, and I don’t know how it
was that he did not kill you, for he is a wonderful shot with a
rifle—he never misses.”

“I will have the man tried for attempted murder,” said John, bringing
the butt-end of his rifle down with a bang on to the bottom of the
cart. “A villain like that shall not go scot-free.”

Jantje grinned. “It is no use, Baas. He would get off, for I am the
only witness. A jury won’t believe a black man in this country, and
they would never punish a Boer for shooting at an Englishman. No, Baas!
you should lie up one day in the veldt where he is going to pass and
shoot _him_. That is what I would do if I dared.”




CHAPTER XI.
ON THE BRINK


For a few weeks after John Niel’s adventure at the shooting-party no
event of any importance occurred at Mooifontein. Day followed day in
charming monotony, for, whatever “gay worldlings” may think, monotony
is as full of charm as a dreamy summer afternoon. “Happy is the country
that has no history,” says the voice of wisdom, and the same remark may
be made with even more truth of the individual. To get up in the
morning conscious of health and strength, to pursue the common round
and daily task till evening comes, and finally to go to bed pleasantly
tired and sleep the sleep of the just, is the true secret of happiness.
Fierce excitements, excursions, and alarms do not conduce either to
mental or physical well-being, and it is for this reason that we find
that those whose lives have been chiefly concerned with them crave the
most after the quiet round of domestic life. When they get it, often,
it is true, they pant for the ardours of the fray whereof the dim and
distant sounds are echoing through the spaces of their heart, in the
same way that the countries without a history are sometimes anxious to
write one in their own blood. But that is a principle of Nature, who
will allow of no standing still among her subjects, and who has
ordained that strife of one sort or another shall be the absolute
condition of existence.

On the whole, John found that the life of a South African farmer came
well up to his expectations. He had ample occupation; indeed, what
between ostriches, horses, cattle, sheep, and crops, he was rather over
than under occupied. Nor was he much troubled by the lack of civilised
society, for he was a man who read a great deal, and books could be
ordered from Durban and Cape Town, while the weekly mail brought with
it a sufficient supply of papers. On Sundays he always read the
political articles in the “Saturday Review” aloud to Silas Croft, who,
as he grew older, found that the print tried his eyes, an attention
which the old man greatly appreciated. Silas was a well-informed man,
and notwithstanding his long life spent in a half-civilised country,
had never lost his hold of affairs or his interest in the wide and
rushing life of the world in one of whose side eddies he lived apart.
This task of reading the “Saturday Review” aloud had formerly been a
part of Bessie’s Sunday service, but her uncle was very glad to effect
an exchange. Bessie’s mind was not quite in tune with the profundities
of that learned journal, and her attention was apt to wander at the
most pointed passages.

Thus it came about, what between the “Saturday Review” and other
things, that a very warm and deep attachment sprang up twixt the old
man and his younger partner. John was a taking man, especially to the
aged, for whom he was never tired of performing little services. One of
his favourite sayings was that old people should be “let down easy,”
and he acted up to it. Moreover, there was a quiet jollity and a bluff
honesty about him which was undoubtedly attractive both to men and
women. Above all, he was a well-informed, experienced man, and a
gentleman, in a country in which both were rare. Each week Silas Croft
came to rely more and more on him, and allowed things to pass more and
more into his hands.

“I’m getting old, Niel,” he said to him one night; “I’m getting very
old; the grasshopper is becoming a burden to me: and I’ll tell you what
it is, my boy,” laying his hand affectionately upon John’s shoulder, “I
have no son of my own, and you must be a son to me, as my dear Bessie
has been a daughter.”

John looked up into the kindly, handsome face, crowned with its fringe
of snowy hair, and at the keen eyes set deep in it beneath the
overhanging brows, and thought of his old father who was long since
dead; and somehow he was moved, and his own eyes filled with tears.

“Ay, Mr. Croft,” he said, taking the old man’s hand, “that I will to
the best of my ability.”

“Thank you, my boy, thank you. I don’t like talking much about these
things, but, as I said, I am getting old, and the Almighty may require
my account any hour, and if He does I rely on you to look after these
two girls. It is a wild country this, and one never knows what will
happen in it from day to day, and they may want help. Sometimes I wish
I were clear of the place. And now I’m going to bed. I am beginning to
feel as though I had done my day’s work in the world. I’m getting
feeble John, this is the fact of it.”

After that he always called him John.

Of Jess they heard but little. She wrote every week, it is true, and
gave an accurate account of all that was going on at Pretoria and of
her daily doings, but she was one of those people whose letters tell
one absolutely nothing of themselves and of what is passing in their
minds. They ought to have been headed “Our Pretoria Letter,” as Bessie
said disgustedly after reading through three sheets in Jess’s curious,
upright handwriting. “Once you lose sight of Jess,” she went on, “she
might as well be dead for all you learn about her. Not that one learns
very much when she is here,” she added reflectively.

“She is a peculiar woman,” said John thoughtfully. At first he had
missed her very much, for, strange as she undoubtedly was, she had
touched a new string in him, of the existence of which he had not till
then been himself aware. And what is more, it had answered strongly
enough for some time; but now it was slowly vibrating itself into
silence again, much as a harp does when the striker takes his fingers
from the strings. Had she stayed on another week or so the effect might
have been more enduring.

But although Jess had gone away Bessie had not. On the contrary, she
was always about him, surrounding him with that tender care a woman,
however involuntarily, cannot prevent herself from lavishing on the man
she loves. Her beauty moved about the place like a beam of light about
a garden, for she was indeed a lovely woman, and as pure and good as
she was lovely. Nor could John long remain in ignorance of her liking
for himself. He was not a vain man—very much the reverse, indeed—but
neither was he a fool. And it must be said that, though Bessie never
overstepped the bounds of maidenly reserve, neither did she take
particular pains to hide her preference. Indeed, it was too strong to
permit her so to do. Not that she was animated by the half-divine,
soul-searing breath of passion, such as animated her sister, which is a
very rare thing, and, take it altogether, as undesirable and unsuitable
to the ordinary conditions of this prosaic and work-a-day life as it is
rare. But she was tenderly and truly in love after the usual
young-womanly fashion; indeed, her passion, measured by the everyday
standard, would have proved to be a deep one. However this might be,
she was undoubtedly prepared to make John Niel a faithful and loving
wife if he chose to ask her to marry him.

And as the weeks went on—though, of course, he knew nothing of all
this—it became a very serious question to John whether he should not
ask her. It is not good for a man to live alone, especially in the
Transvaal, and it was not possible for him to pass day by day at the
side of so much beauty and so much grace without thinking that it would
be well to draw the bond of union closer. Indeed, had John been a
younger man of less experience, he would have succumbed to the
temptation much sooner than he did. But he was neither very young nor
very inexperienced. Ten years or more ago, in his green and gushing
youth, as has been said, he had burnt his fingers to the bone, and a
lively recollection of this incident in his career heretofore had
proved a very efficient warning. Also, he had reached that period of
life when men think a great many times before they commit themselves
wildly to the deep matrimonial waters. At three-and-twenty, for the
sake of a pretty face, most of us are willing to undertake the serious
and in many cases overwhelming burdens, risks, and cares of family
life, and the responsibility of the parentage of a large and healthy
brood, but at three-and-thirty we take a different view of the matter.
The temptation may be great, but the per contra list is so very
alarming, and we never know even then if we see all the liabilities.
Such are the black thoughts that move in the breasts of selfish men, to
the great disadvantage of the marriage market; and however it may lower
John Niel in the eyes of those who take the trouble to follow this
portion of his life’s history, in the interests of truth it must be
confessed that he was not free from them.

In short, sweet and pretty as Bessie might be, he was not violently in
love with her; and at thirty-four a man must be violently in love to
rush into the near risk of matrimony. But, however commendably cautious
that man may be, he is always liable to fall into temptation
sufficiently strong to sweep away his caution and make a mockery of his
plans. However strong the rope, it has its breaking strain; and in the
same way our power of resistance to any given course depends entirely
upon the power of the temptation to draw us into it. Thus it was
destined to be with our friend John Niel.

It was about a week after his conversation with old Silas Croft that it
occurred to John that Bessie’s manner had grown rather strange of late.
It seemed to him that she had avoided his society instead of showing a
certain partiality for it, if not of courting it. Also, she had looked
pale and worried, and evinced a tendency to irritation that was quite
foreign to her natural sweetness of character. Now, when a person on
whom one is accustomed to depend for most of that social intercourse
and those pleasant little amenities which members of one sex value from
another, suddenly cuts off the supply without any apparent rhyme or
reason, it is enough to induce a feeling of wonder, not to say of
vexation, in the breast. It never occurred to John that the reason
might be that Bessie was truly fond of him, and perhaps unconsciously
disappointed that he did not show a warmer interest in her. If,
however, we were to examine into the facts of the case we should
probably discover that here was the real explanation of this change.
Bessie was a straightforward young person, whose mind and purposes were
as clear as running water. She was vexed with John—though she would
probably not have owned it even to herself in so many words—and her
manner reflected the condition of her mind.

“Bessie,” said John one lovely day, just as the afternoon was merging
into evening, “Bessie”—he always called her Bessie now—“I am going down
to the black wattle plantation by the big mealie patch. I want to see
how those young trees are doing. If you have done your cooking”—for she
had been engaged in making a cake, as young ladies, to their souls’
health, often have to do in the Colonies—“I wish you would put on your
hat and come with me. I don’t believe that you have been out to-day.”

“Thank you, Captain Niel, I don’t think that I want to come out.”

“Why not?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know—because there is too much to do. If I go out that
stupid girl will burn the cake,” and she pointed to a Kafir _intombi_
(young girl), who, arrayed in a blue smock, a sweet smile, and a
feather stuck in her wool, was vigorously employed in staring at the
flies on the ceiling and sucking her black fingers. “Really,” she added
with a little stamp, “one needs the patience of an angel to put up with
that idiot’s stupidity. Yesterday she smashed the biggest dinner-dish
and then brought me the pieces with a broad grin on her face and asked
me to ‘make them one’ again. The white people were so clever, she said,
it would be no trouble to me. If they could make the china plate once,
and could cause flowers to grow on it, it would surely be easy to make
it whole again. I did not know whether to laugh or cry or throw the
pieces at her.”

“Look here, young woman,” said John, taking the sinning girl by the arm
and leading her solemnly to the oven, which was opened to receive the
cake; “look here, if you let that cake burn while the _inkosikaas_
(lady chieftain) is away, when I come back I will cram you into the
oven to burn with it. I cooked a girl like that in Natal last year, and
when she came out she was quite white!”

Bessie translated this fiendish threat, whereat the girl grinned from
ear to ear and murmured “_Koos_” (chief) in cheerful acquiescence. A
Kafir maid on a pleasant afternoon is not troubled by the prospect of
being baked at nightfall, which is a long way off, especially when it
is John Niel who threatened the baking. The natives about Mooifontein
had taken the measure of John’s foot by this time with accuracy. His
threats were awful, but his performances were not great. Once, indeed,
he was forced to engage in a stand-up fight with a great fellow who
thought that he could be taken advantage of on this account, but after
he had succeeded in administering a sound hiding to that champion he
was never again troubled in this respect.

“Now,” he said, “I think we have provided for the safety of your cake,
so come on.”

“Thank you, Captain Niel,” answered Bessie, looking at him in a
bewitching little way she well knew how to assume, “thank you, but I
think I had rather not go out walking.” This was what she said, but her
eyes added, “I am offended with you; I want to have nothing to do with
you.”

“Very well,” said John; “then I suppose I must go alone,” and he took
up his hat with the air of a martyr.

Bessie looked through the open kitchen door at the lights and shadows
that chased each other across the swelling bosom of the hill behind the
house.

“It certainly is very fine,” she said; “are you going far?”

“No, only round the plantation.”

“There are so many puff-adders down there, and I hate snakes,”
suggested Bessie, by way of finding another excuse for not coming.

“Oh, I’ll look after the puff-adders—come along.”

“Well,” she said at last, as she slowly unrolled her sleeves, which had
been tucked up during the cake-making, and hid her beautiful white
arms, “I will come, not because I want to come, but because you have
over-persuaded me. I don’t know what is happening to me,” she added,
with a little stamp and a sudden filling of her eyes with tears, “I do
not seem to have any will of my own left. When I want to do one thing
and you want me to do another it is I who have to do what you want; and
I tell you I don’t like it, Captain Niel, and I shall be very cross out
walking;” and sweeping past him, on her way to fetch her hat, in that
peculiarly graceful fashion which angry women can sometimes assume, she
left John to reflect that he never saw a more charming or taking lady
in Europe or out of it.

He had half a mind to risk it and ask her to marry him. But then,
perhaps, she might refuse him, and that was a contingency which he did
not quite appreciate. After their first youth few men altogether relish
the idea of putting themselves in a position that gives a capricious
woman an opportunity of first figuratively “jumping” on them, and then
perhaps holding them up to the scorn and obloquy of her friends,
relations, and other admirers. For, unfortunately, until the opposite
is clearly demonstrated, many men are apt to believe that not a few
women are by nature capricious, shallow, and unreliable; and John Niel,
owing, possibly, to that unhappy little experience of his youth, must
be reckoned among their misguided ranks.




CHAPTER XII.
OVER IT


On leaving the house Bessie and John took their way down the long
avenue of blue gums. This avenue was old Silas Croft’s particular
pride, since although it had only been planted for about twenty years,
the trees, which in the divine climate and virgin soil of the Transvaal
grow at the most extraordinary rate, were for the most part very lofty,
and as thick in the stem as English oaks of a hundred and fifty years’
standing. The avenue was not over wide, and the trees were planted
quite close one to another, with the result that their brown,
pillar-like stems shot up for many feet without a branch, whilst high
overhead the boughs crossed and intermingled in such a way as to form a
leafy tunnel, through which the landscape beyond appeared as though
through a telescope.

Down this charming avenue John and Bessie walked, and on reaching its
limit they turned to the right and followed a little footpath winding
in and out of the rocks that built up the plateau on the hillside
whereon the house stood. Presently this led them through the orchard;
then came a bare strip of veldt, a very dangerous spot in a
thunderstorm, but a great safeguard to the stead and trees round it,
for the ironstone cropped up here, and from the house one might often
see flash after flash striking down on to it, and even running and
zigzagging about its surface. To the left of this ironstone were some
cultivated lands, and in front of them the plantation, in which John
was anxious to inspect the recently planted wattles.

They walked up to the copse without saying a word. It was surrounded by
a ditch and a low sod wall, whereon Bessie seated herself, remarking
that she would wait there till he had looked at the trees, as she was
afraid of the puff-adders, whereof a large and thriving family were
known to live in this plantation.

John assented, observing that the puff-adders were brutes, and that he
must have some pigs turned in to destroy them, which the pigs effect by
munching them up, apparently without unpleasant consequences to
themselves. Then he departed on his errand, wending his way gingerly
through the feathery black wattles. It did not take long, and he saw no
puff-adders. When he had finished looking at the young trees, he
returned, still walking delicately like Agag. On reaching the border of
the plantation, he paused to look at Bessie, who was some twenty paces
from him, perched sideways on the low sod wall, and framed, as it were,
in the full rich light of the setting sun. Her hat was off, for the sun
had lost its burning force, and the hand that held it hung idly by her,
while her eyes were fixed on the horizon flaming with all the varied
glories of an African sunset. He gazed at her sweet face and lissom
form, and some lines that he had read years before floated into his
mind—

The little curls about her head
Were all her crown of gold,
Her delicate arms drooped downwards
In slender mould,
As white-veined leaves of lilies
Curve and fold.
She moved to measures of music,
As a swan sails the stream—


He had got thus far when she turned and saw him, and he abandoned
poetry in the presence of one who might well have inspired it.

“What are you looking at?” she said with a smile; “the sunset?”

“No; I was looking at you.”

“Then you might have been better employed with the sky,” she answered,
turning her head quickly. “Look at it! Did you ever see such a sunset?
We sometimes get them like that at this time of year when the
thunderstorms are about.”

She was right; it was glorious. The heavy clouds which a couple of
hours before had been rolling like celestial hearses across the azure
deeps were now aflame with glory. Some of them glowed like huge castles
wrapped in fire, others with the dull red heat of burning coal. The
eastern heaven was one sheet of burnished gold that slowly grew to red,
and higher yet to orange and the faintest rose. To the left departing
sunbeams rested lovingly on grey Quathlamba’s crests, even firing the
eternal snows that lay upon his highest peak, and writing once more
upon their whiteness the record of another day fulfilled. Lower down
the sky floated little clouds, flame-flakes fallen from the burning
mass above, and on the earth beneath lay great depths of shadow barred
with the brightness of the dying light.

John stood and gazed at it, and its living, glowing beauty seemed to
fire his imagination, as it fired earth and heaven, in such sort that
the torch of love lit upon his heart like the sunbeams on the mountain
tops. Then from the celestial beauty of the skies he turned to look at
the earthly beauty of the woman who sat there before him, and found
that also fair. Whether it was the contemplation of the glories of
Nature—for there is always a suspicion of melancholy in beautiful
things—or whatever it was, her face had a touch of sadness on it that
he had never seen before, and which certainly added to its charm as a
shadow adds to the charm of the light.

“What are you thinking of, Bessie?” he asked.

She looked up, and he saw that her lips were quivering a little. “Well,
do you know,” she said, “oddly enough, I was thinking of my mother. I
can only just recall her, a woman with a thin, sweet face. I remember
one evening she was sitting in front of a house while the sun was
setting as it is now, and I was playing by her, when suddenly she
called me to her and kissed me, then pointed to the red clouds that
were gathered in the sky, and said, ‘I wonder if you will ever think of
me, dear, when I have passed through those golden gates?’ I did not
understand what she meant, but somehow I have remembered the words, and
though she died so long ago, I do often think of her;” and two large
tears rolled down her face as she spoke.

Few men can bear to see a sweet and pretty woman in tears, and this
little incident was too much for John, whose caution and doubts all
went to the winds together.

“Bessie,” he said, “don’t cry, dear; please, don’t! I can’t bear to see
you cry.”

She looked up as though to remonstrate at his words, then she looked
down again.

“Listen, Bessie,” he went on awkwardly enough, “I have something to say
to you. I want to ask you if—if, in short, you will marry me. Wait a
bit, don’t say anything yet; you know me pretty well by now. I am no
chicken, dear, and I have knocked about the world a good deal, and had
one or two love affairs like other people. But, Bessie, I never met
such a sweet woman, or, if you will let me say it, such a lovely woman
as you are, and if you will have me, dear, I think that I shall be the
luckiest man in South Africa;” and he stopped, not knowing exactly what
else to say, and feeling that the time had not come for action, if
indeed it was to come at all.

When first she understood the drift of his talk Bessie had flushed up
to the eyes, then the blood sank back to her breast, and left her as
pale as a lily. She loved the man, and they were happy words to her,
and she was satisfied with them, though perhaps some women might have
thought that they left a good deal to be desired. But Bessie was not of
an exacting nature.

At last she spoke.

“Are you sure,” she asked, “that you mean all this? You know sometimes
people say things of a sudden, upon an impulse, and afterwards they
wish they never had been said. Then it would be rather awkward
supposing I were to say ‘yes,’ would it not?”

“Of course I am sure,” he said indignantly.

“You see,” went on Bessie, poking at the sod wall with the stick she
held in her hand, “perhaps in this place you might be putting an
exaggerated value on me. You think I am pretty because you see nobody
but Kafir and Boer women, and it would be the same with everything. I’m
not fit to marry such a man as you,” she went on, with a sudden burst
of distress; “I have never seen anything or anybody. I am nothing but
an ignorant, half-educated farmer girl, with nothing to recommend me,
and no fortune except my looks. You are different to me; you are a man
of the world, and if ever you went back to England I should be a drag
on you, and you would be ashamed of me and my colonial ways. If it had
been Jess now, it would have been different, for she has more brains in
her little finger than I have in my whole body.”

Somehow this mention of Jess jarred upon John’s nerves, and chilled him
like a breath of cold wind on a hot day. He wanted to put Jess out of
his mind just now.

“My dear Bessie,” he broke in, “why do you suppose such things? I can
assure you that, if you appeared in a London drawing-room, you would
put most of the women into the shade. Not that there is much chance of
my frequenting London drawing-rooms again,” he added.

“Oh, yes! I may be good-looking; I don’t say that I am not; but can’t
you understand, I do not want you to marry me just because I am a
pretty woman, as the Kafirs marry their wives? If you marry me at all I
want you to marry me because you care for _me_, the real _me_, not my
eyes and my hair. Oh, I don’t know what to answer you! I don’t indeed!”
and she began to cry softly.

“Bessie, dear Bessie!” said John, who was pretty well beside himself by
this time, “just tell me honestly—do you care about me? I am not worth
much, I know, but if you do all this goes for nothing,” and he took her
hand and drew her towards him, so that she half slipped, half rose from
the sod wall and stood face to face with him, for she was a tall woman,
and they were very nearly of a height.

Twice she raised her beautiful eyes to his to answer and twice her
courage failed her; then at last the truth broke from her almost with a
cry:

“Oh, John, I love you with all my heart!”

And now it will be well to drop a veil over the rest of these
proceedings, for there are some things that should be sacred, even from
the pen of the historian, and the first transport of the love of a good
woman is one of them.

Suffice it to say that they sat there side by side on the sod wall, and
were happy as people ought to be under such circumstances, till the
glory departed from the western sky and the world grew cold and pale,
till the night came down and hid the mountains, and only the stars and
they were left to look out across the dusky distances of the wilderness
of plain.

Meanwhile a very different scene was being enacted up at the house half
a mile away.

Not more than ten minutes after John and his lady-love had departed on
that fateful walk to look at the young trees, Frank Muller’s stalwart
form, mounted on his great black horse, was to be seen leisurely
advancing towards the blue-gum avenue. Jantje was lurking about between
the stems of the trees in the peculiar fashion that is characteristic
of the Hottentot, and which doubtless is bred into him after tens of
centuries of tracking animals and hiding from enemies. There he was,
slipping from trunk to trunk, and gazing round him as though he
expected each instant to discover the assegai of an ambushed foe or to
hear the footfall of some savage beast of prey. Absolutely there was no
reason why he should behave in this fashion; he was simply indulging
his natural instincts where he thought nobody would observe him. Life
at Mooifontein was altogether too tame and civilised for Jantje’s
taste, and he needed periodical recreations of this sort. Like a
civilised child he longed for wild beasts and enemies, and if there
were none at hand he found a reflected satisfaction in making a
pretence of their presence.

Presently, however, whilst they were yet a long way off, his quick ear
caught the sound of the horse’s footfalls, and he straightened himself
and listened. Not satisfied with the results, he laid himself down, put
his ear to the earth, and gave a guttural sound of satisfaction.

“Baas Frank’s black horse,” Jantje muttered to himself. “The black
horse has a cracked heel, and one foot hits the ground more softly than
the others. What is Baas Frank coming here for? After Missie I think.
He would be mad if he knew that Missie went down to the plantation with
Baas Niel just now. People go into plantations to kiss each other”
(Jantje was not far out there), “and it would make Baas Frank mad if he
knew that. He would strike me if I told him, or I would tell him.”

The horse’s hoofs were drawing near by now, so Jantje slipped as easily
and naturally as a snake into a thick tuft of rank grass which grew
between the blue gums, and waited. Nobody would have guessed that this
tuft of grass hid a human being; not even a Boer would have guessed it,
unless he had happened to walk right on to the spy, and then it would
have been a chance but that the Hottentot managed to avoid being
trodden on and escaped detection. Again there was no reason why he
should hide himself in this fashion, except that it pleased him to do
so.

Presently the big horse approached, and the snakelike Hottentot raised
his head ever so little and peered out with his beady black eyes
through the straw-like grass stems. They fell on Muller’s cold face. It
was evident that he was in a reflective mood—in an angrily reflective
mood. So absorbed was he that he nearly let his horse, which was also
absorbed by the near prospect of a comfortable stall, put his foot in a
big hole that a wandering antbear had amused

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