I have a friend who lives some miles away, among fantastic rocks
and crimson-flowered Kaffir trees. I was over at his homestead
one day in Christmas week last year and found that he was absent.
He was sleeping at a trading-station to east, the boys said, and
would not be back for a day or so. But he had left word with them
to give me supper should I come. So I had time to notice a
change.
Three or four very cool and fresh water-colors adorned his walls.
They were pinned up there under a trophy of harness. Under each
oblong of paper was a title in old English characters. One was
named 'Sundown.' another 'Sun-up' these both showed the homestead
not as it was now in mid-summer, but as I remembered it in late
winter or early spring, with some of the trees in full flower.
The other picture showed a charming group of children variously
colored among the rocks. I feasted my eyes on it for quite a long
while, noting its detail, which bewildered me. Surely no such
scene had been witnessed lately in all South Africa. Yet I knew
the rocks of the scene; they were close by, and the children were
painted some of them with familiar-looking faces. The title
underneath was 'Innocents.'
I did not see my friend for a week or so after that, and when I
did I did not think at first to ask about the pictures. However,
he began to tell the story of them himself. He was talking about
men on the road, a class with which he had a large acquaintance,
having lodged many of them. 'I had one here last week,' he said,
'a white man in clean white ducks. He stopped two nights, and
went outside painting most of the days. He gave me three
pictures. He could paint, couldn't he? I couldn't catch his name,
and he said he wasn't sure where he was going to stop next. But
he went up the Rosebery Road, and seemed to know his way about.
He hadn't got a bag, and he traveled very light just a blanket or
so and a loaf of bread and a cup. I shouldn't think he'd come to
much harm, would he?' I shook my head. 'He could paint, couldn't
he?' he said, glancing up at the pictures. I nodded. 'That's a
fancy picture,' I said; 'that of the children a pretty fancy. I
wonder what it means.' My friend Dick meditated. 'I don't see
much wrong in the painting anyhow,' he said.
The picture was indeed a pretty fancy there were children white
and black in it, and lambs and kids. The white children were
mixed up with the black curiously. One little sturdy Mashona
carried a white child in his arms. A white boy with fair hair,
aged nine or ten, carried a Mashona baby in a goat's skin
strapped to his back. The light of dawn was in the picture a cool
summer dawn. Between the rocks and the red-sprayed trees of our
country was, as it were, a lawn, close-bit by much feeding into a
fair copy of an English lawn. I looked hard at the picture.
'Those two Mashonas are like the children that were burnt in a
kraal this way,' I said pointing. 'I tried to dress their burns
but they both died.' Dick looked up as I pointed, but he said
nothing. He eschews dwelling on painful subjects very often, I
notice. 'Don't you think that they are like?' I asked.
'Kaffir children favor one another,' Dick said sagely. He stood
watching the picture on the faded wall in silence. Then we
dropped the subject. But the mystery of it remained for me.
A week or two after, that mystery multiplied. Dick was expecting
visitors, and he asked me over to meet them. The male visitor was
an official I used to know of old; he was to bring his sister
with him this time, and the sister I did not know. She was a
charming person; one who had been in the country a long time ago
and left it, but had come back again now to be married and to
make a home in Rosebery. She had reached the homestead about
mid-day, the same day that I came over in the late afternoon.
After tea and before dinner we walked down to the cattle-kraal,
all four of us. Then, when Dick and her brother were ahead she
began to question me about that water-color on the wall. I told
her what Dick had told me. 'He told me that himself,' she said,
'but I didn't understand.'
'I thought I knew two of the children,' I said, 'but Kaffir
children seem much alike to our English eyes, don't they? They
seemed to me to resemble two quite little children I used to come
and see. They were badly burnt near here.'
She started.
'Did they get better?' she asked. I shook my head. She started
again. 'Listen,' she said. 'Two children to whom I used to be
nursery-governess were murdered in the "Rebellion" on a farm
close to this very place. They were staying with their mother's
elder sister. Please do try and tell me this. Why are these
portraits, life-like portraits, of those two children in this
picture?'
I stared at her rather stupidly. Then Dick came to us we, were
close up to the cattle-kraal and called us to come and see his
young stock, and talked to us about them.
'I don't think I'll tell the children's mother,' she said to me.
I was then saying good-night to her in the bright moonlight
outside the homestead door some hours afterwards. 'They live in
the colony now, she and her husband. Telling her might reopen
deep wounds. It wouldn't do any good at all probably, would it?'
'That depends,' I said, 'on the mother's point of view. You're
sure about the likeness?' She gave a sort of sob.
'Trust me for that,' she said. 'I was very fond of them of Claude
and Polly.'
This last dry season, by the ordering of God, that mother came
our way herself. She was on a pilgrimage of her own. Dick sent
over a messenger hot-haste to tell me that a lady was at his
place and had asked for me. She wanted me to spare the morning
to-morrow if I possibly could. She would have me come on an
expedition with her and talk over something that she had in her
mind to do. Couldn't I sleep at Dick's homestead that night?
I could. I came over about nine o'clock I suppose, walking in a
fresh south-easter with a half-moon to light me. Dick was smoking
outside in the yard when I came.
'The lady's tired,' he told me. 'She's turned in already. She's
got a lad with her. He's inside. Come in and have some supper.'
The stranger rose up as I came in, and I greeted him. He was a
tall, fair boy, whose face I seemed to know. He told me that he
had driven his mother down, as I sat over my supper. I glanced up
at the wall curiously before I had finished. The picture was not
there.
'I thought it was better out of the way,' Dick said when his
guest had gone to bed. 'I didn't know how she might take it. It's
the mother of those poor little Scotch children come to see the
place. Wants to put up a gravestone or monument or something,
poor lady!'
Then I knew where I had seen the stranger boy's face. It was the
image of his dead brother's face in the picture, the white
piccaninny that carried the Mashona baby. I whistled softly.
'Who painted that picture?' I said. 'I know all yon told me. But
did that chap ever come down the road again? I never asked you.'
'No,' said Dick, 'I don't know to this day any more about him.'