Part 27 (1/2)
Sophia Ozanne looked at her little, fair daughter with tender eyes, remembering the heartless way Rosanne had spoken of her sister's grief only two nights before.
”How different you are, my Rosalie--forgetting your own sorrow to think of others!”
The girl's eyes filled with tears, but she did not shed them.
”I'm afraid it's only another form of selfishness, mummie dear. I want to be kind and loving to all the world, just so that G.o.d will be good to me and give d.i.c.k another chance.”
”My poor, poor child!” The mother's arms were round her in a moment, ready for comfort, but Rosalie pushed her gently away, smiling with quivering lips.
”Don't pity me, mother. I'm determined to be brave, whatever comes.
But tell me, where are you going, all prinked out in your walking-things?”
”I--I don't know yet, dear.” Mrs. Ozanne looked startled and embarra.s.sed. ”I have various things to do.”
”It's a frightful morning. Do you think you ought to go out?”
”I must,” was the elder woman's firm answer, and she bustled away before there was time for further questioning. Not for anything did she mean to be deterred from the pressing desire in her to go out.
Rosalie had been perfectly right about the weather. It was that arid time of year when the air swirls in gusts of hot wind, laden with gritty blue sand from the debris-heaps, and the finer red dust of the streets. Kimberley dust is notoriously the worst of its kind in a land plagued with dust. Buluwayo runs it pretty close, and Johannesburg, in the spring months, has special sand-devils of its own, but nothing in Africa has ever quite come up to Kimberley at its worst. This was not one of its worst, however; merely a day on which all who had wisdom sat at home within closed doors and sealed windows, awaiting a cessation of the penetrating abomination of filth.
Often, during the morning, Mrs. Ozanne found herself wondering what she was doing wandering about the town on such a day. Desultorily, and with an odd feeling that this was not what she should be about, she let herself be blown along the street and in and out of shops, face bent down, eyes half closed, b.u.mping blindly into people, her skirts swirling and flacking, her hat striving its utmost to escape and take the hair of her head with it. There were no necessary errands to do.
The servants did the shopping, and she rarely went out except to drive in the afternoons. Vaguely she wondered why she had not used the carriage this morning.
Lunch-time came, but she could not bring herself to return home. It seemed to her that there was still something she must do, though she could not remember what.
In the end, she went into a clean, respectable little restaurant and lunched off a lamb chop and boiled potatoes, regardless of the excellent lunch that awaited her at home. Then, like a restless and unclean spirit, out she blew once more into the howling maelstrom of wind and dust.
She began to feel, at last, as if it were a nightmare, this necessity that urged her on, she knew not whither. Dimly, her eyes still blinded by dust, she was aware that she had left the main thoroughfares and was now in a poorer part of the town. With the gait of a sleep-walker, she continued on her way, until suddenly a voice addressing her jerked her broad-awake.
”You come see me, missis?”
A woman had opened the door of a mean tin house and stood there waiting in the doorway, almost as if she had been expecting Sophia Ozanne. The latter stood stone-still, but her mind went racing back to a winter afternoon seventeen years before, when she had sat in her bedroom with the little dying form of Rosanne upon her knees, and a voice speaking from the shadow of her bedroom had said, ”Missis sell baby to me for a farthing; baby not die.” The same voice addressed her now, and the same woman stood in the doorway of the mean house gazing at her with large, mournful eyes. It was Rachel Bangat, the Malay cook.
”You come see me die, missis?” she questioned, in her soft, languorous voice.
”Die! Are you sick, Rachel?” said Mrs. Ozanne.
”Yes, missis; Rachel very sick. Going die in three days.”
Sophia Ozanne searched the dark, high-boned face with horror-stricken eyes, but could see no sign of death on it, or any great change after seventeen years, except a more unearthly mournfulness in the mysterious eyes.
But she had often heard it said that Malays possess a prophetic knowledge of the hour and place of their death, and she could well credit Rachel Bangat with this strange faculty.
”How my baby getting along, missis?”
Such yearning tenderness was in the question that Mrs. Ozanne, spite of a deep repugnance to discuss Rosanne with this woman, found herself answering:
”She is grown up now, Rachel.”
”She very pretty?”