* I take this very useful expression from a delightfulvolume by Mr. Boyle.
Thus spake the Kafirs; yet to this day never hath a man of all their tribe put his shoulder to a wheel, so strong is custom in South Africa; probably in all Africa; since I remember St. Augustin found it stronger than he liked, at Carthage.
Ucatella went to Phoebe, and said, “Missy, my child is good and brave.”
“Bother you and your child!” said poor Phoebe. “To think of his flying at a giant like that, and you letting of him. I'm all of a tremble from head to foot:” and Phoebe relieved herself with a cry.
“Oh, missy!” said Ucatella.
“There, never mind me. Do go and look after your child, and keep him out of more mischief. I wish we were safe at Dale's Kloof, I do.”
Ucatella complied, and went botanizing with Dr. Staines; but that gentleman, in the course of his scientific researches into camomile flowers and blasted heath, which were all that lovely region afforded, suddenly succumbed and stretched out his limbs, and said, sleepily, “Good-night—U—cat—” and was off into the land of Nod.
The wagon, which, by the way, had passed the larger but slower vehicle, found him fast asleep, and Ucatella standing by him as ordered, motionless and grand.
“Oh, dear! what now?” said Phoebe: but being a sensible woman, though in the hen and chickens line, she said, “'Tis the fighting and the excitement. 'Twill do him more good than harm, I think:” and she had him bestowed in the wagon, and never disturbed him night nor day. He slept thirty-six hours at a stretch; and when he awoke, she noticed a slight change in his eye. He looked at her with an interest he had not shown before, and said, “Madam, I know you.”
“Thank God for that,” said Phoebe.
“You kept a little shop, in the other world.”
Phoebe opened her eyes with some little alarm.
“You understand—the world that is locked up—for the present.”
“Well, sir, so I did; and sold you milk and butter. Don't you mind?”
“No—the milk and butter—they are locked up.”
The country became wilder, the signs of life miserably sparse; about every twenty miles the farmhouse or hut of a degenerate Boer, whose children and slaves pigged together, and all ran jostling, and the mistress screamed in her shrill Dutch, and the Hottentots all chirped together, and confusion reigned for want of method: often they went miles, and saw nothing but a hut or two, with a nude Hottentot eating flesh, burnt a little, but not cooked, at the door; and the kloofs became deeper and more turbid, and Phoebe was in an agony about her salt, and Christopher advised her to break it in big lumps, and hang it all about the wagon in sacks; and she did, and Ucatella said profoundly, “My child is wise;” and they began to draw near home, and Phoebe to fidget; and she said to Christopher, “Oh, dear! I hope they are all alive and well: once you leave home, you don't know what may have happened by then you come back. One comfort, I've got Sophy: she is very dependable, and no beauty, thank my stars.”
That night, the last they had to travel, was cloudy, for a wonder, and they groped with lanterns.
Ucatella and her child brought up the rear. Presently there was a light pattering behind them. The swift-eared Ucatella clutched Christopher's arm, and turning round, pointed back, with eyeballs white and rolling. There were full a dozen animals following them, whose bodies seemed colorless as shadows, but their eyes little balls of flaming lime-light.
“GUN!” said Christie, and gave the Kafir's arm a pinch. She flew to the caravan; he walked backwards, facing the foe. The wagon was halted, and Dick ran back with two loaded rifles. In his haste he gave one to Christopher, and repented at leisure; but Christopher took it, and handled it like an experienced person, and said, with delight, “VOLUNTEER.” But with this the cautious animals had vanished like bubbles. But Dick told Christopher they would be sure to come back; he ordered Ucatella into the wagon, and told her to warn Phoebe not to be frightened if guns should be fired. This soothing message brought Phoebe's white face out between the curtains, and she implored them to get into the wagon, and not tempt Providence.
“Not till I have got thee a kaross of jackal's fur.”
“I'll never wear it!” said Phoebe violently, to divert him from his purpose.
“Time will show,” said Dick dryly. “These varmint are on and off like shadows, and as cunning as Old Nick. We two will walk on quite unconcerned like, and as soon as ever the varmint are at our heels you give us the office; and we'll pepper their fur—won't we, doctor?”
“We—will—pepper—their fur,” said Christopher, repeating what to him was a lesson in the ancient and venerable English tongue.
So they walked on expectant; and by and by the four-footed shadows with large lime-light eyes came stealing on; and Phoebe shrieked, and they vanished before the men could draw a bead on them.
“Thou's no use at this work, Pheeb,” said Dick. “Shut thy eyes, and let us have Yuke.”
“Iss, master: here I be.”
“You can bleat like a lamb; for I've heard ye.”
“Iss, master. I bleats beautiful;” and she showed snowy teeth from ear to ear.
“Well, then, when the varmint are at our heels, draw in thy woolly head, and bleat like a young lamb. They won't turn from that, I know, the vagabonds.”
Matters being thus prepared, they sauntered on; but the jackals were very wary. They came like shadows, so departed—a great many times: but at last being re-enforced, they lessened the distance, and got so close, that Ucatella withdrew her head, and bleated faintly inside the wagon. The men turned, levelling their rifles, and found the troop within twenty yards of them. They wheeled directly: but the four barrels poured their flame, four loud reports startled the night, and one jackal lay dead as a stone, another limped behind the flying crowd, and one lay kicking. He was soon despatched, and both carcasses flung over the patient oxen; and good-by jackals for the rest of that journey.
Ucatella, with all a Kafir's love of fire-arms, clapped her hands with delight. “My child shoots loud and strong,” said she.
“Ay, ay,” replied Phoebe; “they are all alike; wherever there's men, look for quarrelling and firing off. We had only to sit quiet in the wagon.”
“Ay.” said Dick, “the cattle especially—for it is them the varmint were after—and let 'em eat my Hottentots.”
At this picture of the cattle inside the wagon, and the jackals supping on cold Hottentot alongside, Phoebe, who had no more humor than a cat, but a heart of gold, shut up, and turned red with confusion at her false estimate of the recent transaction in fur.
When the sun rose they found themselves in a tract somewhat less arid and inhuman; and, at last, at the rise of a gentle slope, they saw, half a mile before them, a large farmhouse partly clad with creepers, and a little plot of turf, the fruit of eternal watering; item, a flower-bed; item, snow-white palings; item, an air of cleanliness and neatness scarcely known to those dirty descendants of clean ancestors, the Boers. At some distance a very large dam glittered in the sun, and a troop of snow-white sheep were watering at it.
“ENGLAND!” cried Christopher.
“Ay, sir,” said Phoebe; “as nigh as man can make it.” But soon she began to fret: “Oh, dear! where are they all? If it was me, I'd be at the door looking out. Ah, there goes Yuke to rouse them up.”
“Come, Pheeb, don't you fidget,” said Dick kindly. “Why, the lazy lot are scarce out of their beds by this time.”
“More shame for 'em. If they were away from me, and coming home, I should be at the door day AND night, I know. Ah!”
She uttered a scream of delight, for just then, out came Ucatella, with little Tommy on her shoulder, and danced along to meet her. As she came close, she raised the chubby child high in the air, and he crowed; and then she lowered him to his mother, who rushed at him, seized, and devoured him with a hundred inarticulate cries of joy and love unspeakable.
“NATURE!” said Christopher dogmatically, recognizing an old acquaintance, and booking it as one more conquest gained over the past. But there was too much excitement over the cherub to attend to him. So he watched the woman gravely, and began to moralize with all his might. “This,” said he, “is what we used to call maternal love; and all animals had it, and that is why the noble savage went for him. It was very good of you, Miss Savage,” said the poor soul sententiously.
“Good of her!” cried Phoebe. “She is all goodness. Savage, find me a Dutchwoman like her! I'll give her a good cuddle for it;” and she took the Kafir round the neck, and gave her a hearty kiss, and made the little boy kiss her too.
At this moment out came a collie dog, hunting Ucatella by scent alone, which process landed him headlong in the group; he gave loud barks of recognition, fawned on Phoebe and Dick, smelt poor Christopher, gave a growl of suspicion, and lurked about squinting, dissatisfied, and lowering his tail.
“Thou art wrong, lad, for once,” said Dick; “for he's an old friend, and a good one.”
“After the dog, perhaps some Christian will come to welcome us,” said poor Phoebe.
Obedient to the wish, out walked Sophy, the English nurse, a scraggy woman, with a very cocked nose and thin, pinched lips, and an air of respectability and pertness mingled. She dropped a short courtesy, shot the glance of a basilisk at Ucatella, and said stiffly, “You are welcome home, ma'am.” Then she took the little boy as one having authority. Not that Phoebe would have surrendered him; but just then Mr. Falcon strolled out, with a cigar in his mouth, and Phoebe, with her heart in HER mouth, flew to meet him. There was a rapturous conjugal embrace, followed by mutual inquiries; and the wagon drew up at the door. Then, for the first time, Falcon observed Staines, saw at once he was a gentleman, and touched his hat to him, to which Christopher responded in kind, and remembered he had done so in the locked-up past.
Phoebe instantly drew her husband apart by the sleeve. “Who do you think that is? You'll never guess. 'Tis the great doctor that saved Dick's life in England with cutting of his throat. But, oh, my dear, he is not the man he was. He is afflicted. Out of his mind partly. Well, we must cure him, and square the account for Dick. I'm a proud woman at finding him, and bringing him here to make him all right again, I can tell you. Oh, I am happy, I am happy. Little did I think to be so happy as I am. And, my dear, I have brought you a whole sackful of newspapers, old and new.”
“That is a good girl. But tell me a little more about him. What is his name?”
“Christie.”
“Dr. Christie?”
“No doubt. He wasn't an apothecary, or a chemist, you may be sure, but a high doctor, and the cleverest ever was or ever will be: and isn't it sad, love, to see him brought down so? My heart yearns for the poor man: and then his wife—the sweetest, loveliest creature you ever—oh!” Phoebe stopped very short, for she remembered something all of a sudden; nor did she ever again give Falcon a chance of knowing that the woman, whose presence had so disturbed him, was this very Dr. Christie's wife. “Curious!” thought she to herself, “the world to be so large, and yet so small:” then aloud, “They are unpacking the wagon; come, dear. I don't think I have forgotten anything of yours. There's cigars, and tobacco, and powder, and shot, and bullets, and everything to make you comfortable, as my duty 'tis; and—oh, but I'm a happy woman.”
Hottentots, big and little, clustered about the wagon. Treasure after treasure was delivered with cries of delight; the dogs found out it was a joyful time, and barked about the wheeled treasury; and the place did not quiet down till sunset.
A plain but tidy little room was given to Christopher, and he slept there like a top. Next morning his nurse called him up to help her water the grass. She led the way with a tub on her head and two buckets in it. She took him to the dam; when she got there she took out the buckets, left one on the bank, and gave the other to Christie. She then went down the steps till the water was up to her neck, and bade Christie fill the tub. He poured eight bucketsful in. Then she came slowly out, straight as an arrow, balancing this tub full on her head. Then she held out her hands for the two buckets. Christie filled them, wondering, and gave them to her. She took them like toy buckets, and glided slowly home with this enormous weight, and never spilled a drop. Indeed, the walk was more smooth and noble than ever, if possible.
When she reached the house, she hailed a Hottentot, and it cost the man and Christopher a great effort of strength to lower her tub between them.
“What a vertebral column you must have!” said Christopher.
“You must not speak bad words, my child,” said she. “Now, you water the grass and the flowers.” She gave him a watering-pot, and watched him maternally; but did not put a hand to it. She evidently considered this part of the business as child's play, and not a fit exercise of her powers.
It was only by drowning that little oasis twice a day that the grass was kept green and the flowers alive.
She found him other jobs in course of the day, and indeed he was always helping somebody or other, and became quite ruddy, bronzed, and plump of cheek, and wore a strange look of happiness, except at times when he got apart, and tried to recall the distant past. Then he would knit his brow, and looked perplexed and sad.
They were getting quite used to him, and he to them, when one day he did not come in to dinner. Phoebe sent out for him; but they could not find him.
The sun set. Phoebe became greatly alarmed, and even Dick was anxious.
They all turned out, with guns and dogs, and hunted for him beneath the stars.
Just before daybreak Dick Dale saw a fire sparkle by the side of a distant thicket. He went to it, and there was Ucatella seated, calm and grand as antique statue, and Christopher lying by her side, with a shawl thrown over him. As Dale came hurriedly up, she put her finger to her lips, and said, “My child sleeps. Do not wake him. When he sleeps, he hunts the past, as Collie hunts the springbok.”
“Here's a go,” said Dick. Then, hearing a chuckle, he looked up, and was aware of a comical appendage to the scene. There hung, head downwards, from a branch, a Kafir boy, who was, in fact, the brother of the stately Ucatella, only went further into antiquity for his models of deportment; for, as she imitated the antique marbles, he reproduced the habits of that epoch when man roosted, and was arboreal. Wheel somersaults, and, above all, swinging head downwards from a branch, were the sweeteners of his existence.
“Oh! YOU are there, are you?” said Dick.
“Iss,” said Ucatella. “Tim good boy. Tim found my child.”
“Well,” said Dick, “he has chosen a nice place. This is the clump the last lion came out of, at least they say so. For my part, I never saw an African lion; Falcon says they've all took ship, and gone to England. However, I shall stay here with my rifle till daybreak. 'Tis tempting Providence to lie down on the skirt of a wood for Lord knows what to jump out on ye unawares.”
Tim was sent home for Hottentots, and Christopher was carried home, still sleeping, and laid on his own bed.
He slept twenty-four hours more, and, when he was fairly awake, a sort of mist seemed to clear away in places, and he remembered things at random. He remembered being at sea on the raft with the dead body; that picture was quite vivid to him. He remembered, too, being in the hospital, and meeting Phoebe, and every succeeding incident; but as respected the more distant past, he could not recall it by any effort of his will. His mind could only go into that remoter past by material stepping-stones; and what stepping-stones he had about him here led him back to general knowledge, but not to his private history.
In this condition he puzzled them all strangely at the farm; his mind was alternately so clear and so obscure. He would chat with Phoebe, and sometimes give her a good practical hint; but the next moment, helpless for want of memory, that great faculty without which judgment cannot act, having no material.
After some days of this, he had another great sleep. It brought him back the distant past in chapters. His wedding-day. His wife's face and dress upon that day. His parting with her: his whole voyage out: but, strange to say, it swept away one-half of that which he had recovered at his last sleep, and he no longer remembered clearly how he came to be at Dale's Kloof.
Thus his mind might be compared to one climbing a slippery place, who gains a foot or two, then slips back; but on the whole gains more than he loses.
He took a great liking to Falcon. That gentleman had the art of pleasing, and the tact never to offend.
Falcon affected to treat the poor soul's want of memory as a common infirmity; pretended he was himself very often troubled in the same way, and advised him to read the newspapers. “My good wife,” said he, “has brought me a whole file of the Cape Gazette. I'd read them if I was you. The deuce is in it, if you don't rake up something or other.”
Christopher thanked him warmly for this: he got the papers to his own little room, and had always one or two in his pocket for reading. At first he found a good many hard words that puzzled him; and he borrowed a pencil of Phoebe, and noted them down. Strange to say, the words that puzzled him were always common words, that his unaccountable memory had forgotten: a hard word, he was sure to remember that.
One day he had to ask Falcon the meaning of “spendthrift.” Falcon told him briefly. He could have illustrated the word by a striking example; but he did not. He added, in his polite way, “No fellow can understand all the words in a newspaper. Now, here's a word in mine—'Anemometer;' who the deuce can understand such a word?”
“Oh, THAT is a common word enough,” said poor Christopher. “It means a machine for measuring the force of the wind.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Falcon; but did not believe a word of it.
One sultry day Christopher had a violent headache, and complained to Ucatella. She told Phoebe, and they bound his brows with a wet handkerchief, and advised him to keep in-doors. He sat down in the coolest part of the house, and held his head with his hands, for it seemed as if it would explode into two great fragments.
All in a moment the sky was overcast with angry clouds, whirling this way and that. Huge drops of hail pattered down, and the next minute came a tremendous flash of lightning, accompanied, rather than followed, by a crash of thunder close over their heads.
This was the opening. Down came a deluge out of clouds that looked mountains of pitch, and made the day night but for the fast and furious strokes of lightning that fired the air. The scream of wind and awful peals of thunder completed the horrors of the scene.
In the midst of this, by what agency I know no more than science or a sheep does, something went off inside Christopher's head, like a pistol-shot. He gave a sort of scream, and dashed out into the weather.
Phoebe heard his scream and his flying footstep, and uttered an ejaculation of fear. The whole household was alarmed, and, under other circumstances, would have followed him; but you could not see ten yards.
A chill sense of impending misfortune settled on the house. Phoebe threw her apron over her head, and rocked in her chair.
Dick himself looked very grave.
Ucatella would have tried to follow him; but Dick forbade her. “'Tis no use,” said he. “When it clears, we that be men will go for him.”
“Pray Heaven you may find him alive!”
“I don't think but what we shall. There's nowhere he can fall down to hurt himself, nor yet drown himself, but our dam; and he has not gone that way. But”—
“But what?”
“If we do find him, we must take him back to Cape Town, before he does himself, or some one, a mischief. Why, Phoebe, don't you see the man has gone raving mad?”
The electrified man rushed out into the storm, but he scarcely felt it in his body; the effect on his mind overpowered hail-stones. The lightning seemed to light up the past; the mighty explosions of thunder seemed cannon strokes knocking down a wall, and letting in his whole life.
Six hours the storm raged, and, before it ended, he had recovered nearly his whole past, except his voyage with Captain Dodd—that, indeed, he never recovered—and the things that happened to him in the hospital before he met Phoebe Falcon and her brother: and as soon as he had recovered his lost memory, his body began to shiver at the hail and rain. He tried to find his way home, but missed it; not so much, however, but that he recovered it as soon as it began to clear, and just as they were coming out to look for him, he appeared before them, dripping, shivering, very pale and worn, with the handkerchief still about his head.
At sight of him, Dick slipped back to his sister, and said, rather roughly, “There now, you may leave off crying: he is come home; and to-morrow I take him to Cape Town.”
Christopher crept in, a dismal, sinister figure.
“Oh, sir,” said Phoebe, “was this a day for a Christian to be out in? How could you go and frighten us so?”
“Forgive me, madam,” said Christopher humbly; “I was not myself.”
“The best thing you can do now is to go to bed, and let us send you up something warm.”
“You are very good,” said Christopher, and retired with the air of one too full of great amazing thoughts to gossip.
He slept thirty hours at a stretch, and then, awaking in the dead of night, he saw the past even more clear and vivid; he lighted his candle and began to grope in the Cape Gazette. As to dates, he now remembered when he had sailed from England, and also from Madeira. Following up this clew, he found in the Gazette a notice that H. M. ship Amphitrite had been spoken off the Cape, and had reported the melancholy loss of a promising physician and man of science, Dr. Staines.
The account said every exertion had been made to save him, but in vain.
Staines ground his teeth with rage at this. “Every exertion! the false-hearted curs. They left me to drown, without one manly effort to save me. Curse them, and curse all the world.”
Pursuing his researches rapidly, he found a much longer account of a raft picked up by Captain Dodd, with a white man on it and a dead body, the white man having on him a considerable sum in money and jewels.
Then a new anxiety chilled him. There was not a word to identify him with Dr. Staines. The idea had never occurred to the editor of the Cape Gazette. Still less would it occur to any one in England. At this moment his wife must be mourning for him. “Poor—poor Rosa!”
But perhaps the fatal news might not have reached her.
That hope was dashed away as soon as found. Why, these were all OLD NEWSPAPERS. That gentlemanly man who had lent them to him had said so.
Old! yet they completed the year 1867.
He now tore through them for the dates alone, and soon found they went to 1868. Yet they were old papers. He had sailed in May, 1867.
“My God!” he cried, in agony, “I HAVE LOST A YEAR.”
This thought crushed him. By and by he began to carry this awful idea into details. “My Rosa has worn mourning for me, and put it off again. I am dead to her, and to all the world.”
He wept long and bitterly.
Those tears cleared his brain still more. For all that, he was not yet himself; at least, I doubt it; his insanity, driven from the intellect, fastened one lingering claw into his moral nature, and hung on by it. His soul filled with bitterness and a desire to be revenged on mankind for their injustice, and this thought possessed him more than reason.
He joined the family at breakfast; and never a word all the time. But when he got up to go, he said, in a strange, dogged way, as if it went against the grain, “God bless the house that succors the afflicted.” Then he went out to brood alone.
“Dick,” said Phoebe, “there's a change. I'll never part with him: and look, there's Collie following him, that never could abide him.”
“Part with him?” said Reginald. “Of course not. He is a gentleman, and they are not so common in Africa.”
Dick, who hated Falcon, ignored this speech entirely, and said, “Well, Pheeb, you and Collie are wiser than I am. Take your own way, and don't blame me if anything happens.”
Soon Christopher paid the penalty of returning reason. He suffered all the poignant agony a great heart can endure.
So this was his reward for his great act of self-denial in leaving his beloved wife. He had lost his patient; he had lost the income from that patient; his wife was worse off than before, and had doubtless suffered the anguish of a loving heart bereaved. His mind, which now seemed more vigorous than ever, after its long rest, placed her before his very eyes, pale, and worn with grief, in her widow's cap.
At the picture, he cried like the rain. He could give her joy, by writing; but he could not prevent her from suffering a whole year of misery.
Turning this over in connection with their poverty, his evil genius whispered, “By this time she has received the six thousand pounds for your death. SHE would never think of that; but her father has: and there is her comfort assured, in spite of the caitiffs who left her husband to drown like a dog.
“I know my Rosa,” he thought. “She has swooned—ah, my poor darling—she has raved—she has wept,” he wept himself at the thought—“she has mourned every indiscreet act, as if it was a crime. But she HAS done all this. Her good and loving but shallow nature is now at rest from the agonies of bereavement, and nought remains but sad and tender regrets. She can better endure that than poverty: cursed poverty, which has brought her and me to this, and is the only real evil in the world, but bodily pain.”
Then came a struggle, that lasted a whole week, and knitted his brows, and took the color from his cheek; but it ended in the triumph of love and hate, over conscience and common sense. His Rosa should not be poor; and he would cheat some of those contemptible creatures called men, who had done him nothing but injustice, and at last had sacrificed his life like a rat's.
When the struggle was over, and the fatal resolution taken, then he became calmer, less solitary, and more sociable.
Phoebe, who was secretly watching him with a woman's eye, observed this change in him, and, with benevolent intentions, invited him one day to ride round the farm with her. He consented readily. She showed him the fields devoted to maize and wheat, and then the sheepfolds. Tim's sheep were apparently deserted; but he was discovered swinging head downwards from the branch of a camel-thorn, and seeing him, it did strike one that if he had had a tail he would have been swinging by that. Phoebe called to him: he never answered, but set off running to her, and landed himself under her nose in a wheel somersault.
“I hope you are watching them, Tim,” said his mistress.
“Iss, missy, always washing 'em.”
“Why, there's one straying towards the wood now.”
“He not go far,” said Tim coolly. The young monkey stole off a little way, then fell flat, and uttered the cry of a jackal, with startling precision. Back went the sheep to his comrades post haste, and Tim effected a somersault and a chuckle.
“You are a clever boy,” said Phoebe. “So that is how you manage them.”
“Dat one way, missy,” said Tim, not caring to reveal all his resources at once.
Then Phoebe rode on, and showed Christopher the ostrich pan. It was a large basin, a form the soil often takes in these parts; and in it strutted several full-grown ostriches and their young, bred on the premises. There was a little dam of water, and plenty of food about. They were herded by a Kafir infant of about six, black, glossy, fat, and clean, being in the water six times a day.
Sometimes one of the older birds would show an inclination to stray out of the pan. Then the infant rolled after her, and tapped her ankles with a wand. She instantly came back, but without any loss of dignity, for she strutted with her nose in the air, affecting completely to ignore the inferior little animal, that was nevertheless controlling her movements. “There's a farce,” said Phoebe. “But you would not believe the money they cost me, nor the money they bring me in. Grain will not sell here for a quarter its value: and we can't afford to send it to Cape Town, twenty days and back; but finery, that sells everywhere. I gather sixty pounds the year off those poor fowls' backs—clear profit.”
She showed him the granary, and told him there wasn't such another in Africa. This farm had belonged to one of the old Dutch settlers, and that breed had been going down this many a year. “You see, sir, Dick and I being English, and not downright in want of money, we can't bring ourselves to sell grain to the middlemen for nothing, so we store it, hoping for better times, that maybe will never come. Now I'll show you how the dam is made.”
They inspected the dam all round. “This is our best friend of all,” said she. “Without this the sun would turn us all to tinder,—crops, flowers, beasts, and folk.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Staines. “Then it is a pity you have not built it more scientifically. I must have a look at this.”
“Ay do, sir, and advise us if you see anything wrong. But hark! it is milking time. Come and see that.” So she led the way to some sheds, and there they found several cows being milked, each by a little calf and a little Hottentot at the same time, and both fighting and jostling each other for the udder. Now and then a young cow, unused to incongruous twins, would kick impatiently at both animals and scatter them.
“That is their way,” said Phoebe: “they have got it into their silly Hottentot heads as kye won't yield their milk if the calf is taken away; and it is no use arguing with 'em; they will have their own way; but they are very trusty and honest, poor things. We soon found that out. When we came here first it was in a hired wagon, and Hottentot drivers: so when we came to settle I made ready for a bit of a wrangle. But my maid Sophy, that is nurse now, and a great despiser of heathens, she says, 'Don't you trouble; them nasty ignorant blacks never charges more than their due.' 'I forgive 'em,' says I; 'I wish all white folk was as nice.' However, I did give them a trifle over, for luck: and then they got together and chattered something near the door, hand in hand. 'La, Sophy,' says I, 'what is up now?' Says she, 'They are blessing of us. Things is come to a pretty pass, for ignorant Muslinmen heathen to be blessing Christian folk.' 'Well,' says I, 'it won't hurt us any.' 'I don't know,' says she. 'I don't want the devil prayed over me.' So she cocked that long nose of hers and followed it in a doors.”
By this time they were near the house, and Phoebe was obliged to come to her postscript, for the sake of which, believe me, she had uttered every syllable of this varied chat. “Well, sir,” said she, affecting to proceed without any considerable change of topic, “and how do you find yourself? Have you discovered the past?”
“I have, madam. I remember every leading incident of my life.”
“And has it made you happier?” said Phoebe softly.
“No,” said Christopher gravely. “Memory has brought me misery.”
“I feared as much; for you have lost your fine color, and your eyes are hollow, and lines on your poor brow that were not there before. Are you not sorry you have discovered the past?”
“No, Mrs. Falcon. Give me the sovereign gift of reason, with all the torture it can inflict. I thank God for returning memory, even with the misery it brings.”
Phoebe was silent a long time: then she said in a low, gentle voice, and with the indirectness of a truly feminine nature, “I have plenty of writing-paper in the house; and the post goes south to-morrow, such as 'tis.”
Christopher struggled with his misery, and trembled.
He was silent a long time. Then he said, “No. It is her interest that I should be dead.”
“Well, but, sir—take a thought.”
“Not a word more, I implore you. I am the most miserable man that ever breathed.” As he spoke, two bitter tears forced their way.
Phoebe cast a look of pity on him, and said no more; but she shook her head. Her plain common sense revolted.
However, it did not follow he would be in the same mind next week: so she was in excellent spirits at her protege's recovery, and very proud of her cure, and celebrated the event with a roaring supper, including an English ham, and a bottle of port wine; and, ten to one, that was English too.
Dick Dale looked a little incredulous, but he did not spare the ham any the more for that.
After supper, in a pause of conversation, Staines turned to Dick, and said, rather abruptly, “Suppose that dam of yours were to burst and empty its contents, would it not be a great misfortune to you?”
“Misfortune, sir! Don't talk of it. Why, it would ruin us, beast and body.”
“Well, it will burst, if it is not looked to.”
“Dale's Kloof dam burst! the biggest and strongest for a hundred miles round.”
“You deceive yourself. It is not scientifically built, to begin, and there is a cause at work that will infallibly burst it, if not looked to in time.”
“And what is that, sir?”
“The dam is full of crabs.”
“So 'tis; but what of them?”
“I detected two of them that had perforated the dyke from the wet side to the dry, and water was trickling through the channel they had made. Now, for me to catch two that had come right through, there must be a great many at work honeycombing your dyke; those channels, once made, will be enlarged by the permeating water, and a mere cupful of water forced into a dyke by the great pressure of a heavy column has an expansive power quite out of proportion to the quantity forced in. Colossal dykes have been burst in this way with disastrous effects. Indeed, it is only a question of time, and I would not guarantee your dyke twelve hours. It is full, too, with the heavy rains.”
“Here's a go!” said Dick, turning pale. “Well, if it is to burst, it must.”
“Why so? You can make it safe in a few hours. You have got a clumsy contrivance for letting off the excess of water: let us go and relieve the dam at once of two feet of water. That will make it safe for a day or two, and to-morrow we will puddle it afresh, and demolish those busy excavators.”
He spoke with such authority and earnestness, that they all got up from table; a horn was blown that soon brought the Hottentots, and they all proceeded to the dam. With infinite difficulty they opened the waste sluice, lowered the water two feet, and so drenched the arid soil that in forty-eight hours flowers unknown sprang up.
Next morning, under the doctor's orders, all the black men and boys were diving with lumps of stiff clay and puddling the endangered wall with a thick wall of it. This took all the people the whole day.
Next day the clay wall was carried two feet higher, and then the doctor made them work on the other side and buttress the dyke with supports so enormous as seemed extravagant to Dick and Phoebe; but, after all, it was as well to be on the safe side, they thought: and soon they were sure of it, for the whole work was hardly finished when the news came in that the dyke of a neighboring Boer, ten miles off, had exploded like a cannon, and emptied itself in five minutes, drowning the farm-yard and floating the furniture, but leaving them all to perish of drought; and indeed the Boer's cart came every day, with empty barrels, for some time, to beg water of the Dales. Ucatella pondered all this, and said her doctor child was wise.
This brief excitement over, Staines went back to his own gloomy thoughts, and they scarcely saw him, except at supper-time.
One evening he surprised them all by asking if they would add to all their kindness by lending him a horse, and a spade, and a few pounds to go to the diamond fields.
Dick Dale looked at his sister. She said, “We had rather lend them you to go home with, sir, if you must leave us; but, dear heart, I was half in hopes—Dick and I were talking it over only yesterday—that you would go partners like with us; ever since you saved the dam.”
“I have too little to offer for that, Mrs. Falcon; and, besides, I am driven into a corner. I must make money quickly, or not at all: the diamonds are only three hundred miles off: for heaven's sake, let me try my luck.”
They tried to dissuade him, and told him not one in fifty did any good at it.
“Ay, but I shall,” said he. “Great bad luck is followed by great good luck, and I feel my turn is come. Not that I rely on luck. An accident directed my attention to the diamond a few years ago, and I read a number of prime works upon the subject that told me of things not known to the miners. It is clear, from the Cape journals, that they are looking for diamonds in the river only. Now, I am sure that is a mistake. Diamonds, like gold, have their matrix, and it is comparatively few gems that get washed into the river. I am confident that I shall find the volcanic matrix, and perhaps make my fortune in a week or two.”
When the dialogue took this turn, Reginald Falcon's cheek began to flush, and his eyes to glitter.
Christopher continued: “You who have befriended me so will not turn back, I am sure, when I have such a chance before me; and as for the small sum of money I shall require, I will repay you some day, even if”—
“La, sir, don't talk so. If you put it that way, why, the best horse we have, and fifty pounds in good English gold, they are at your service to-morrow.”
“And pick and spade to boot,” said Dick, “and a double rifle, for there are lions, and Lord knows what, between this and the Vaal river.”
“God bless you both!” said Christopher. “I will start to-morrow.”
“And I'll go with you,” said Reginald Falcon.