Part 19 (2/2)
”Nothing,” she repeated. ”The mat is frayed and ... and I nearly stumbled. But there was something I wanted to tell you, Otto.”
Her voice shook, but he did not hear it, blind to what she did, deaf to what she said, still absorbed in his papers:
”What's that?”
”Oorip has suggested that the servants would like to have a sacrifice, because a new well has been built in the grounds....”
”That well which is two months old?”
”They don't make use of the water.”
”Why not?”
”They are superst.i.tious, you know; they refuse to use the water before the sacrifice has been offered.”
”Then it ought to have been done at once. Why didn't they tell Kario at once to ask me? I can't think of all that nonsense myself. But I would have given them the sacrifice then. Now it's like mustard after meat. The well is two months old.”
”It would be a good thing all the same, Papa,” said Theo. ”You know what the Javanese are like: they won't use the well as long as they've not had a sacrifice.”
”No,” said Van Oudijck, unwillingly, shaking his head. ”To give them a sacrifice now would have no sense in it. I would have done so gladly; but now, after two months, it would be absurd. They ought to have asked for it at once.”
”Do, Otto,” Leonie entreated. ”I should give them the sacrifice. You'll please me if you do.”
”Mamma half-promised Oorip,” Theo insisted gently.
They stood trembling before him, white in the face, like pet.i.tioners. But he, weary and thinking of his papers, was seized with a stubborn unwillingness, though he was seldom able to refuse his wife anything.
”No, Leonie,” he said, firmly. ”And you must never promise things of which you're not certain.”
He turned away, went round the screen and sat down to his work.
They looked at each other, the mother and the step-son. Slowly, aimlessly, they moved away, to the front-verandah, where a moist, dripping darkness drifted between the stately pillars. They saw a white form coming through the swamped garden. They started, for they were now afraid of everything, thinking at the sight of every figure of the chastis.e.m.e.nt that would overtake them like some strange thing, if they remained in the paternal house which they had covered with shame. But, when they looked more closely, they saw that it was Doddie. She had come home; she said, trembling, that she had been at Eva Eldersma's. Actually she had been walking with Addie de Luce; and they had sheltered from the rain in the compound. She was very pale, she was trembling; but Leonie and Theo did not notice it in the dark verandah, even as she herself did not see that her step-mother and Theo were pale. She was trembling like that because in the garden--Addie had brought her to the gate--stones had been thrown at her. It must have been some impudent Javanese, who hated her father and his house and his household; but, in the dark verandah, where she saw her step-mother and her brother sitting side by side in silence, as though in despair, she suddenly felt, she did not know why, that it was not an impudent Javanese....
She sat down by them, silently. They looked out at the damp, dark garden, over which the s.p.a.cious night was hovering as on the wings of a gigantic bat. And, in the mute melancholy which drifted like a grey twilight between the tall white pillars, all three of them--Doddie singly, but the step-mother and step-son together--felt frightened to death and crushed by the strange thing that was about to befall them....
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
And, despite their anxiety, the two sought each other all the oftener, feeling themselves now bound by indissoluble bonds. In the afternoon he would steal to her room; and, despite their anxiety, they lost themselves in wild embraces and then remained close together.
”It must be nonsense, Leonie,” he whispered.
”Yes, but then what is it?” she murmured in return. ”After all, I heard the moaning and heard the stone whizz through the air.”
”And then?”
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