As the two girls rounded the side of the kopje, an unusual scene
presented itself. A large group was gathered at the back door of the
homestead.
On the doorstep stood the Boer-woman, a hand on each hip, her face
red and fiery, her head nodding fiercely. At her feet sat the yellow
Hottentot maid, her satellite, and around stood the black Kaffer maids,
with blankets twisted round their half-naked figures. Two, who stamped
mealies in a wooden block, held the great stampers in their hands, and
stared stupidly at the object of attraction. It certainly was not to
look at the old German overseer, who stood in the centre of the group,
that they had all gathered together. His salt-and-pepper suit, grizzly
black beard, and grey eyes were as familiar to every one on the farm
as the red gables of the homestead itself; but beside him stood the
stranger, and on him all eyes were fixed. Ever and anon the newcomer
cast a glance over his pendulous red nose to the spot where the
Boer-woman stood, and smiled faintly.
“I’m not a child,” cried the Boer-woman, in low Cape Dutch, “and I
wasn’t born yesterday. No, by the Lord, no! You can’t take me in! My
mother didn’t wean me on Monday. One wink of my eye and I see the whole
thing. I’ll have no tramps sleeping on my farm,” cried Tant Sannie
blowing. “No, by the devil, no! not though he had sixty-times-six red
noses.”
There the German overseer mildly interposed that the man was not a
tramp, but a highly respectable individual, whose horse had died by an
accident three days before.
“Don’t tell me,” cried the Boer-woman; “the man isn’t born that can take
me in. If he’d had money, wouldn’t he have bought a horse? Men who walk
are thieves, liars, murderers, Rome’s priests, seducers! I see the devil
in his nose!” cried Tant Sannie shaking her fist at him; “and to come
walking into the house of this Boer’s child and shaking hands as though
he came on horseback! Oh, no, no!”
The stranger took off his hat, a tall, battered chimneypot, and
disclosed a bald head, at the back of which was a little fringe of
curled white hair, and he bowed to Tant Sannie.
“What does she remark, my friend?” he inquired, turning his
crosswise-looking eyes on the old German.
The German rubbed his old hands and hesitated.
“Ah--well--ah--the--Dutch--you know--do not like people who walk--in
this country--ah!”
“My dear friend,” said the stranger, laying his hand on the German’s
arm, “I should have bought myself another horse, but crossing, five days
ago, a full river, I lost my purse--a purse with five hundred pounds
in it. I spent five days on the bank of the river trying to find
it--couldn’t. Paid a Kaffer nine pounds to go in and look for it at the
risk of his life--couldn’t find it.”
The German would have translated this information, but the Boer-woman
gave no ear.
“No, no; he goes tonight. See how he looks at me--a poor unprotected
female! If he wrongs me, who is to do me right?” cried Tant Sannie.
“I think,” said the German in an undertone, “if you didn’t look at her
quite so much it might be advisable. She--ah--she--might--imagine that
you liked her too well,--in fact--ah--”
“Certainly, my dear friend, certainly,” said the stranger. “I shall not
look at her.”
Saying this, he turned his nose full upon a small Kaffer of two years
old. That small naked son of Ham became instantly so terrified that he
fled to his mother’s blanket for protection, howling horribly.
Upon this the newcomer fixed his eyes pensively on the stamp-block,
folding his hands on the head of his cane. His boots were broken, but he
still had the cane of a gentleman.
“You vagabonds se Engelschman!” said Tant Sannie, looking straight at
him.
This was a near approach to plain English; but the man contemplated the
block abstractedly, wholly unconscious that any antagonism was being
displayed toward him.
“You might not be a Scotchman or anything of that kind, might you?”
suggested the German. “It is the English that she hates.”
“My dear friend,” said the stranger, “I am Irish every inch of
me--father Irish, mother Irish. I’ve not a drop of English blood in my
veins.”
“And you might not be married, might you?” persisted the German. “If you
had a wife and children, now? Dutch people do not like those who are not
married.”
“Ah,” said the stranger, looking tenderly at the block, “I have a dear
wife and three sweet little children--two lovely girls and a noble boy.”
This information having been conveyed to the Boer-woman, she, after some
further conversation, appeared slightly mollified; but remained firm to
her conviction that the man’s designs were evil.
“For, dear Lord!” she cried; “all Englishmen are ugly; but was there
ever such a red-rag-nosed thing with broken boots and crooked eyes
before? Take him to your room,” she cried to the German; “but all the
sin he does I lay at your door.”
The German having told him how matters were arranged, the stranger made
a profound bow to Tant Sannie and followed his host, who led the way to
his own little room.
“I thought she would come to her better self soon,” the German said
joyously. “Tant Sannie is not wholly bad, far from it, far.” Then seeing
his companion cast a furtive glance at him, which he mistook for one of
surprise, he added quickly, “Ah, yes, yes; we are all a primitive people
here--not very lofty. We deal not in titles. Every one is Tante and
Oom--aunt and uncle. This may be my room,” he said, opening the door.
“It is rough, the room is rough; not a palace--not quite. But it may be
better than the fields, a little better!” he said, glancing round at his
companion. “Come in, come in. There is something to eat--a mouthful: not
the fare of emperors or kings; but we do not starve, not yet,” he
said, rubbing his hands together and looking round with a pleased,
half-nervous smile on his old face.
“My friend, my dear friend,” said the stranger, seizing him by the hand,
“may the Lord bless you, the Lord bless and reward you--the God of the
fatherless and the stranger. But for you I would this night have slept
in the fields, with the dews of heaven upon my head.”
Late that evening Lyndall came down to the cabin with the German’s
rations. Through the tiny square window the light streamed forth, and
without knocking she raised the latch and entered. There was a fire
burning on the hearth, and it cast its ruddy glow over the little dingy
room, with its worm-eaten rafters and mud floor, and broken whitewashed
walls. A curious little place, filled with all manner of articles. Next
to the fire was a great toolbox; beyond that the little bookshelf with
its well-worn books; beyond that, in the corner, a heap of filled and
empty grain-bags. From the rafters hung down straps, riems, old boots,
bits of harness, and a string of onions. The bed was in another corner,
covered by a patchwork quilt of faded red lions, and divided from the
rest of the room by a blue curtain, now drawn back. On the mantelshelf
was an endless assortment of little bags and stones; and on the wall
hung a map of South Germany, with a red line drawn through it to show
where the German had wandered. This place was the one home the girls had
known for many a year. The house where Tant Sannie lived and ruled was
a place to sleep in, to eat in, not to be happy in. It was in vain she
told them they were grown too old to go there; every morning and evening
found them there. Were there not too many golden memories hanging about
the old place for them to leave it?
Long winter nights, when they had sat round the fire and roasted
potatoes, and asked riddles, and the old man had told of the little
German village, where, fifty years before, a little German boy had
played at snowballs, and had carried home the knitted stockings of a
little girl who afterward became Waldo’s mother; did they not seem to
see the German peasant girls walking about with their wooden shoes and
yellow, braided hair, and the little children eating their suppers out
of little wooden bowls when the good mothers called them in to have
their milk and potatoes?
And were there not yet better times than these? Moonlight nights, when
they romped about the door, with the old man, yet more a child than any
of them, and laughed, till the old roof of the wagon-house rang?
Or, best of all, were there not warm, dark, starlight nights, when they
sat together on the doorstep, holding each other’s hands, singing German
hymns, their voices rising clear in the still night air--till the German
would draw away his hand suddenly to wipe quickly a tear the children
must not see? Would they not sit looking up at the stars and talking of
them--of the dear Southern Cross, red, fiery Mars, Orion, with his belt,
and the Seven Mysterious Sisters--and fall to speculating over them?
How old are they? Who dwelt in them? And the old German would say
that perhaps the souls we loved lived in them; there, in that little
twinkling point was perhaps the little girl whose stockings he had
carried home; and the children would look up at it lovingly, and call it
“Uncle Otto’s star.” Then they would fall to deeper speculations--of
the times and seasons wherein the heavens shall be rolled together as
a scroll, and the stars shall fall as a fig-tree casteth her untimely
figs, and there shall be time no longer: “When the Son of man shall
come in His glory, and all His holy angels with Him.” In lower and lower
tones they would talk, till at last they fell into whispers; then they
would wish good night softly, and walk home hushed and quiet.
Tonight, when Lyndall looked in, Waldo sat before the fire watching a
pot which simmered there, with his slate and pencil in his hand; his
father sat at the table buried in the columns of a three-weeks-old
newspaper; and the stranger lay stretched on the bed in the corner,
fast asleep, his mouth open, his great limbs stretched out loosely,
betokening much weariness. The girl put the rations down upon the table,
snuffed the candle, and stood looking at the figure on the bed.
“Uncle Otto,” she said presently, laying her hand down on the newspaper,
and causing the old German to look up over his glasses, “how long did
that man say he had been walking?”
“Since this morning, poor fellow! A gentleman--not accustomed to
walking--horse died--poor fellow!” said the German, pushing out his lip
and glancing commiseratingly over his spectacles in the direction of
the bed where the stranger lay, with his flabby double chin, and broken
boots through which the flesh shone.
“And do you believe him, Uncle Otto?”
“Believe him? why of course I do. He himself told me the story three
times distinctly.”
“If,” said the girl slowly, “he had walked for only one day his boots
would not have looked so; and if--”
“If!” said the German starting up in his chair, irritated that any one
should doubt such irrefragable evidence--“if! Why, he told me himself!
Look how he lies there,” added the German pathetically, “worn out--poor
fellow! We have something for him though,” pointing with his forefinger
over his shoulder to the saucepan that stood on the fire. “We are not
cooks--not French cooks, not quite; but it’s drinkable, drinkable, I
think; better than nothing, I think,” he added, nodding his head in a
jocund manner that evinced his high estimation of the contents of
the saucepan and his profound satisfaction therein. “Bish! bish! my
chicken,” he said, as Lyndall tapped her little foot up and down upon
the floor. “Bish! bish! my chicken, you will wake him.”
He moved the candle so that his own head might intervene between it
and the sleeper’s face; and, smoothing his newspaper, he adjusted his
spectacles to read.
The child’s grey-black eyes rested on the figure on the bed, then turned
to the German, then rested on the figure again.
“I think he is a liar. Good night, Uncle Otto,” she said slowly, turning
to the door.
Long after she had gone the German folded his paper up methodically, and
put it in his pocket.
The stranger had not awakened to partake of the soup, and his son had
fallen asleep on the ground. Taking two white sheepskins from the heap
of sacks in the corner, the old man doubled them up, and lifting the
boy’s head gently from the slate on which it rested, placed the skins
beneath it.
“Poor lambie, poor lambie!” he said, tenderly patting the great rough
bear-like head; “tired is he!”
He threw an overcoat across the boy’s feet, and lifted the saucepan from
the fire. There was no place where the old man could comfortably lie
down himself, so he resumed his seat. Opening a much-worn Bible, he
began to read, and as he read pleasant thoughts and visions thronged on
him.
“I was a stranger, and ye took me in,” he read.
He turned again to the bed where the sleeper lay.
“I was a stranger.”
Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body
nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and
fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very
real to him. “Jesus, lover, and is it given to us, weak and sinful,
frail and erring, to serve Thee, to take Thee in!” he said softly, as he
rose from his seat. Full of joy, he began to pace the little room. Now
and again as he walked he sang the lines of a German hymn, or muttered
broken words of prayer. The little room was full of light. It appeared
to the German that Christ was very near him, and that at almost any
moment the thin mist of earthly darkness that clouded his human eyes
might be withdrawn, and that made manifest of which the friends at
Emmaus, beholding it, said, “It is the Lord!”
Again, and yet again, through the long hours of that night, as the
old man walked he looked up to the roof of his little room, with its
blackened rafters, and yet saw them not. His rough bearded face was
illuminated with a radiant gladness; and the night was not shorter to
the dreaming sleepers than to him whose waking dreams brought heaven
near.
So quickly the night fled, that he looked up with surprise when at four
o’clock the first grey streaks of summer dawn showed themselves through
the little window. Then the old man turned to rake together the few
coals that lay under the ashes, and his son, turning on the sheepskins,
muttered sleepily to know if it were time to rise.
“Lie still, lie still! I would only make a fire,” said the old man.
“Have you been up all night?” asked the boy.
“Yes; but it has been short, very short. Sleep again, my chicken; it is
yet early.”
And he went out to fetch more fuel.