Part 3 (1/2)
It seemed to her the most horrible moment of her life while she stood shrinking there in the shadow, listening to the door open and close, the bar being replaced, the quiet, regular breathing of that other person. Whoever it was, his movements were calm and undisturbed, but Christine could see nothing, only a large, dim outline that moved sure-footedly across the room, opened another door on the far side, closed it, and was gone.
There were so many other doors, so many other pa.s.sages. All Christine could be certain of and thankful for was that it was not her door and her pa.s.sage that had swallowed up the mysterious night-walker. It was some little time before she collected sufficient fort.i.tude to creep back whence she had come, her plan unfulfilled, her courage melted.
She was bitterly ashamed, yet felt as if she had escaped from some great evil. Once in the nursery, she locked the door, lighted a candle, and, after she had looked to ascertain that the children were sleeping soundly, she opened her dressing-case and took out a little box of cachets that had been prescribed for her a year before when bitter trouble had stolen sleep for many a night. She felt, and with some reason, that this was an occasion when it would not be too cowardly to resort to artificial means of restoring her nerves by sleep. For though fright and surprise had bereft her, for the time being, of her nerve, her firm spirit was neither beaten nor cowed. She meant to see this thing through, and her last waking thought was a murmured prayer for help to steel her heart against terrors that walked by night, and to resist to the utmost any menace of evil that should approach the little children in her charge.
PART II
There followed some tranquil days of which nothing broke the peaceful monotony. The children were extraordinarily tractable, perhaps because Mrs. van Cannan seemed too preoccupied to lay any injunctions upon them. True, Roddy made one of his mysterious disappearances, but it was not long before Christine, hard on his heels, discovered him emerging from an outhouse, where she later a.s.sured herself that he could have come to no great harm, for it was merely a big barn stacked with grain and forage, and a number of old packing cases. Nothing there to account for the expression he wore--that same suggestion of tears fiercely restrained which she had noticed when they were looking at the unmarked grave in the cemetery. It wrung her heart to see his young mouth pursed up to whistle a tune that would not come, the look of longing in eyes where only happiness and the divine contentment of childhood should dwell; but the boy volunteered no information, and she did not press him. She wanted his confidence, not to have him regard her as a sort of jailer.
Every day, in the cool of the early morning, while the others were still sleeping, he and she visited the graveyard, starting the good work of making it blossom like the rose, as Christine had promised.
They planted lilies and geraniums over the little brothers, and edged the lonely, unmarked grave with a species of curly-leaved box common to that part of the country and which grew rapidly. It was Roddy's fancy, too, to cover this grave with portulaca--a little plant bearing starry flowers of vivid hues that live for a day only. He chose plants that bore only scarlet and golden blossoms.
”She liked those two colours,” he told Christine, smiling. ”She said that when we were babies we were all like that--very red, with yellowy golden hair.”
Christine, looking at the bright head and the fresh cheeks so rare in a South African child, readily understood. But she could not help wondering, as before, at the loyal little heart that remembered so well the words and fancies of a dead woman--when all others forgot!
Nearly always on returning from these morning excursions they met Saltire, rapidly wreaking destruction upon the district. Already, scores of the p.r.i.c.kly-pears through which they must wend their way were a.s.suming the staggering att.i.tude characteristic of them as the sap dried and they died of their wounds. Sometimes, one side of a bush would shrivel first, causing it to double up like a creature agonizing.
Some crouched like strange beasts watching to spring. Others thrust themselves ominously forward with projected arms, as if ready to grapple. Some brandished their flat leaves as the painter Wiertz, in his famous picture of _Napoleon in h.e.l.l_, made wives and mothers brandish their menacing fists at the man who had robbed them of their loved ones. All wore a look that suggested both agony and revenge.
Christine understood, at last, why the Kafirs hated to go about the land after dark, averring that the afflicted bushes threatened and chased them. She began herself to experience an inexplicable feeling of relief, as though at the overcoming of an enemy, when a great spire of smoke betokened the final uprooting and burning of a clump of bush.
For fire was the ultimate element used to transform the pest from a malignant into a beneficent factor, and, as aromatic ash, it became of service to the land it had ruined so long. Almost, the process seemed an exposition of Job's words: ”When thou hast tried me with fire, I shall come forth as gold.”
It was a curious thing how the ”personality” of the bushes appeared to affect them all. Saltire at his work gave the impression of a fighter concentrating on the defeat of an enemy. Roddy would dance for joy before each staggering bush. The impa.s.sivity of the natives departed from them when they stood about the funeral pyres, and clapping of hands and warlike chanting went heavenward with the smoke. Christine and Roddy often lingered to watch these rejoicings; indeed, it was impossible at any time to get the boy past Saltire and his gang without a halt. The English girl, while standing somewhat aloof, would nevertheless not conceal from herself the interest she felt in the forestry man's remarks, not only on the common enemy, but his work in general.
”They have a great will to live, Roddy--much stronger than you and I, because we dissipate our will in so many directions. I've met this determination before in growing things, though. There are plants in the African jungle that you have to track and trail like wild beasts and do murder upon before they will die. And this old p.r.i.c.kly-pear is of the same family. If a bit of leaf can break off and fly past you, it hides itself behind a stone, hastily puts roots into the ground, and grows into a bush before you can say 'Jack Robinson.' Your farm will be a splendid place when we've got rid of all these and replaced them with the spineless plant. p.r.i.c.kly-pear without spines is a perfect food for cattle and ostriches in this climate.”
Thus he talked to Roddy, as if the latter were already a man and in possession of his heritage--the wide lands of Blue Aloes; but always while he talked, he looked at and considered the girl who stood aloof, wearing her air of world-weariness like a veil over the youth and bloom of her.
And she, on her side, was considering and reading him, too. She liked him better, because, since that first night of Mr. van Cannan's departure, he had absented himself from the dinner-table. That showed some glimmer of grace in him. Still, there was far too much arrogance in his manner, she thought, and decided that he had probably been spoiled by too facile women. Nothing blunts the fine spiritual side of a man's character so rapidly as a.s.sociation with women of low ideals.
The romance of her own life had been split upon that rock. She had known what it was to stand by and see the man she loved with all the pure idealism of youth wrecked by the cheap wiles of a high-born woman with a second-rate soul. Perhaps her misfortune had sharpened her vision for this defect in men. Certainly, it had tainted her outlook with disdain. She sometimes felt, as Pater wrote of _Mona Lisa_, that ”she had looked upon all the world, and her eyelids were a little weary.” At any rate, when she found d.i.c.k Saltire's blue eyes looking into hers so straightly and significantly that it almost seemed as if an arrow came glancing from him to her, she merely told herself, with an inward-smiling bitterness, that no doubt the same phenomenon occurred when he spoke to Mrs. van Cannan.
Some days after the departure of the master of the farm for the coast, the post-bag arrived from Cradock, and, as Mrs. van Cannan was still sleeping, it fell to Christine, as it had sometimes done before, to distribute the mail. Among her own large batch of home letters it was so unusual to find a South African one that she opened it immediately, and was astonished to discover it to be from Bernard van Cannan. It had been written from Cradock on the evening of the day he left the farm.
”DEAR MISS CHAINE:
”I want once more to commend to you the very special care of my children while I am away. My wife, not being very strong, is unable to see as much of them as she would wish, and I do not like her to be worried. But there are many dangers on a farm, and I have already, by most unhappy chance, lost two young sons. Both deaths occurred during absences of mine and were the result of accident, though, at the time, they were surrounded by every loving care and security. Perhaps, therefore, you will understand the kind of superst.i.tious apprehension I feel about Roderick, who is the last and only one left to come after me in the old place. He has always needed special looking-after, being extremely curious and impulsive while, at the same time, nervous and reticent.
”Perhaps it is only my illness that makes me full of fears, but _I can a.s.sure you that had it not been for the great confidence you have inspired in me from the first_, I should not have left the farm, so anxious do I continually feel about the welfare of my third and last son. However, I trust in G.o.d I shall be back soon, better in health, to find that all is well.
”Do not worry my dear wife with this matter. She is of a disposition that cannot cope with sorrow and trouble, and I would not for the world cloud her happy outlook with my morbid fancies. Keep my confidence, and remember that I rely on you with all my heart to guard my little ones.
”Sincerely yours,
”BERNARD VAN CANNAN.
”P. S.--I append my last London address, and if I am detained for any time, I shall be glad to hear from you.”