Bonaparte Blenkins was riding home on the grey mare. He had ridden out
that afternoon, partly for the benefit of his health, partly to
maintain his character as overseer of the farm. As he rode on slowly, he
thoughtfully touched the ears of the grey mare with his whip.
“No, Bon, my boy,” he addressed himself, “don’t propose! You can’t marry
for four years, on account of the will; then why propose? Wheedle her,
tweedle her, teedle her, but don’t let her make sure of you. When a
woman,” said Bonaparte, sagely resting his finger against the side of
his nose, “When a woman is sure of you she does what she likes with
you; but when she isn’t, you do what you like with her. And I--” said
Bonaparte.
Here he drew the horse up suddenly and looked. He was now close to the
house, and leaning over the pigsty wall, in company with Em, who was
showing her the pigs, was a strange female figure. It was the first
visitor that had appeared on the farm since his arrival, and he looked
at her with interest. She was a tall, pudgy girl of fifteen, weighing
a hundred and fifty pounds, with baggy pendulous cheeks and up-turned
nose. She strikingly resembled Tant Sannie, in form and feature, but
her sleepy good eyes lacked that twinkle that dwelt in the Boer-woman’s
small orbs. She was attired in a bright green print, wore brass rings in
her ears and glass beads round her neck, and was sucking the tip of her
large finger as she looked at the pigs.
“Who is it that has come?” asked Bonaparte, when he stood drinking his
coffee in the front room.
“Why, my niece, to be sure,” said Tant Sannie, the Hottentot maid
translating. “She’s the only daughter of my only brother Paul, and she’s
come to visit me. She’ll be a nice mouthful to the man that can get
her,” added Tant Sannie. “Her father’s got two thousand pounds in the
green wagon box under his bed, and a farm, and five thousand sheep,
and God Almighty knows how many goats and horses. They milk ten cows in
mid-winter, and the young men are after her like flies about a bowl of
milk. She says she means to get married in four months, but she doesn’t
yet know to whom. It was so with me when I was young,” said Tant Sannie.
“I’ve sat up with the young men four and five nights a week. And they
will come riding again, as soon as ever they know that the time’s up
that the Englishman made me agree not to marry in.”
The Boer-woman smirked complacently.
“Where are you going to?” asked Tant Sannie presently, seeing that
Bonaparte rose.
“Ha! I’m just going to the kraals; I’ll be in to supper,” said
Bonaparte.
Nevertheless, when he reached his own door he stopped and turned in
there. Soon after he stood before the little glass, arrayed in his best
white shirt with the little tucks, and shaving himself. He had on his
very best trousers, and had heavily oiled the little fringe at the
back of his head, which, however, refused to become darker. But what
distressed him most was his nose--it was very red. He rubbed his finger
and thumb on the wall, and put a little whitewash on it; but, finding
it rather made matters worse, he rubbed it off again. Then he looked
carefully into his own eyes. They certainly were a little pulled down at
the outer corners, which gave them the appearance of looking crosswise;
but then they were a nice blue. So he put on his best coat, took up his
stick, and went out to supper, feeling on the whole well satisfied.
“Aunt,” said Trana to Tant Sannie when that night they lay together in
the great wooden bed, “why does the Englishman sigh so when he looks at
me?”
“Ha!” said Tant Sannie, who was half asleep, but suddenly started, wide
awake. “It’s because he thinks you look like me. I tell you, Trana,”
said Tant Sannie, “the man is mad with love of me. I told him the other
night I couldn’t marry till Em was sixteen, or I’d lose all the sheep
her father left me. And he talked about Jacob working seven years and
seven years again for his wife. And of course he meant me,” said Tant
Sannie pompously. “But he won’t get me so easily as he thinks; he’ll
have to ask more than once.”
“Oh!” said Trana, who was a lumpish girl and not much given to talking;
but presently she added, “Aunt, why does the Englishman always knock
against a person when he passes them?”
“That’s because you are always in the way,” said Tant Sannie.
“But, aunt,” said Trana, presently, “I think he is very ugly.”
“Phugh!” said Tant Sannie. “It’s only because we’re not accustomed to
such noses in this country. In his country he says all the people have
such noses, and the redder your nose is the higher you are. He’s of the
family of the Queen Victoria, you know,” said Tant Sannie, wakening up
with her subject; “and he doesn’t think anything of governors and church
elders and such people; they are nothing to him. When his aunt with
the dropsy dies he’ll have money enough to buy all the farms in this
district.”
“Oh!” said Trana. That certainly made a difference.
“Yes,” said Tant Sannie; “and he’s only forty-one, though you’d take him
to be sixty. And he told me last night the real reason of his baldness.”
Tant Sannie then proceeded to relate how, at eighteen years of age,
Bonaparte had courted a fair young lady. How a deadly rival, jealous
of his verdant locks, his golden flowing hair, had, with a damnable
and insinuating deception, made him a present of a pot of pomatum. How,
applying it in the evening, on rising in the morning he found his pillow
strewn with the golden locks, and, looking into the glass, beheld
the shining and smooth expanse which henceforth he must bear. The few
remaining hairs were turned to a silvery whiteness, and the young lady
married his rival.
“And,” said Tant Sannie solemnly, “if it had not been for the grace of
God, and reading of the psalms, he says he would have killed himself. He
says he could kill himself quite easily if he wants to marry a woman and
she won’t.”
“Alle wereld!” said Trana: and then they went to sleep.
Every one was lost in sleep soon; but from the window of the cabin the
light streamed forth. It came from a dung fire, over which Waldo sat
brooding. Hour after hour he sat there, now and again throwing a fresh
lump of fuel on to the fire, which burnt up bravely, and then sank into
a great bed of red coals, which reflected themselves in the boy’s eyes
as he sat there brooding, brooding, brooding. At last, when the fire was
blazing at its brightest, he rose suddenly and walked slowly to a beam
from which an ox riem hung. Loosening it, he ran a noose in one end and
then doubled it round his arm.
“Mine, mine! I have a right,” he muttered; and then something louder,
“if I fall and am killed, so much the better!”
He opened the door and went out into the starlight.
He walked with his eyes bent upon the ground, but overhead it was one of
those brilliant southern nights when every space so small that your hand
might cover it shows fifty cold white points, and the Milky-Way is a
belt of sharp frosted silver. He passed the door where Bonaparte lay
dreaming of Trana and her wealth, and he mounted the ladder steps. From
those he clambered with some difficulty on to the roof of the house. It
was of old rotten thatch with a ridge of white plaster, and it crumbled
away under his feet at every step. He trod as heavily as he could. So
much the better if he fell.
He knelt down when he got to the far gable, and began to fasten his riem
to the crumbling bricks. Below was the little window of the loft. With
one end of the riem tied round the gable, the other end round his waist,
how easy to slide down to it, and to open it, through one of the broken
panes, and to go in, and to fill his arms with books, and to clamber up
again! They had burnt one book--he would have twenty. Every man’s hand
was against his--his should be against every man’s. No one would help
him--he would help himself.
He lifted the black damp hair from his knit forehead, and looked round
to cool his hot face. Then he saw what a regal night it was. He knelt
silently and looked up. A thousand eyes were looking down at him, bright
and so cold. There was a laughing irony in them.
“So hot, so bitter, so angry? Poor little mortal?”
He was ashamed. He folded his arms, and sat on the ridge of the roof
looking up at them.
“So hot, so bitter, so angry?”
It was as though a cold hand had been laid upon his throbbing forehead,
and slowly they began to fade and grow dim. Tant Sannie and the burnt
book, Bonaparte and the broken machine, the box in the loft, he himself
sitting there--how small they all became! Even the grave over yonder.
Those stars that shone on up above so quietly, they had seen a thousand
such little existences fight just so fiercely, flare up just so brightly
and go out; and they, the old, old stars, shone on forever.
“So hot, so angry, poor little soul?” they said.
The riem slipped from his fingers; he sat with his arms folded, looking
up.
“We,” said the stars, “have seen the earth when it was young. We have
seen small things creep out upon its surface--small things that prayed
and loved and cried very loudly, and then crept under it again. But we,”
said the stars, “are as old as the Unknown.”
He leaned his chin against the palm of his hand and looked up at them.
So long he sat there that bright stars set and new ones rose, and yet he
sat on.
Then at last he stood up, and began to loosen the riem from the gable.
What did it matter about the books? The lust and the desire for them had
died out. If they pleased to keep them from him they might. What matter?
it was a very little thing. Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let it be
as it would.
He twisted the riem round his arm and walked back along the ridge of the
house.
By this time Bonaparte Blenkins had finished his dream of Trana, and as
he turned himself round for a fresh doze he heard the steps descending
the ladder. His first impulse was to draw the blanket over his head and
his legs under him, and to shout; but recollecting that the door was
locked and the window carefully bolted, he allowed his head slowly to
crop out among the blankets, and listened intently. Whosoever it might
be, there was no danger of their getting at him; so he clambered out of
bed, and going on tiptoe to the door, applied his eye to the keyhole.
There was nothing to be seen; so walking to the window, he brought his
face as close to the glass as his nose would allow. There was a figure
just discernible. The lad was not trying to walk softly, and the heavy
shuffling of the well-known velschoens could be clearly heard through
the closed window as they crossed the stones in the yard. Bonaparte
listened till they had died away round the corner of the wagon-house;
and, feeling that his bare legs were getting cold, he jumped back into
bed again.
*****
“What do you keep up in your loft?” inquired Bonaparte of the Boer-woman
the next evening, pointing upwards and elucidating his meaning by the
addition of such Dutch words as he knew, for the lean Hottentot was gone
home.
“Dried skins,” said the Boer-woman, “and empty bottles, and boxes, and
sacks, and soap.”
“You don’t keep any of your provisions there--sugar, now?” said
Bonaparte, pointing to the sugar-basin and then up at the loft.
Tant Sannie shook her head.
“Only salt, and dried peaches.”
“Dried peaches! Eh?” said Bonaparte. “Shut the door, my dear child, shut
it tight,” he called out to Em, who stood in the dining room. Then
he leaned over the elbow of the sofa and brought his face as close as
possible to the Boer-woman’s, and made signs of eating. Then he said
something she did not comprehend; then said, “Waldo, Waldo, Waldo,”
pointed up to the loft, and made signs of eating again.
Now an inkling of his meaning dawned on the Boer-woman’s mind. To make
it clearer, he moved his legs after the manner of one going up a ladder,
appeared to be opening a door, masticated vigorously, said, “Peaches,
peaches, peaches,” and appeared to be coming down the ladder.
It was now evident to Tant Sannie that Waldo had been in her loft and
eaten her peaches.
To exemplify his own share in the proceedings, Bonaparte lay down on the
sofa, and shutting his eyes tightly, said, “Night, night, night!” Then
he sat up wildly, appearing to be intently listening, mimicked with his
feet the coming down a ladder, and looked at Tant Sannie. This clearly
showed how, roused in the night, he had discovered the theft.
“He must have been a great fool to eat my peaches,” said Tant Sannie.
“They are full of mites as a sheepskin, and as hard as stones.”
Bonaparte, fumbling in his pocket, did not even hear her remark, and
took out from his coat-tail a little horsewhip, nicely rolled up.
Bonaparte winked at the little rhinoceros horsewhip, at the Boer-woman,
and then at the door.
“Shall we call him--Waldo, Waldo?” he said.
Tant Sannie nodded, and giggled. There was something so exceedingly
humorous in the idea that he was going to beat the boy, though for her
own part she did not see that the peaches were worth it. When the Kaffer
maid came with the wash-tub she was sent to summon Waldo; and Bonaparte
doubled up the little whip and put it in his pocket. Then he drew
himself up, and prepared to act his important part with becoming
gravity. Soon Waldo stood in the door, and took off his hat.
“Come in, come in, my lad,” said Bonaparte, “and shut the door behind.”
The boy came in and stood before them.
“You need not be so afraid, child,” said Tant Sannie. “I was a child
myself once. It’s no great harm if you have taken a few.”
Bonaparte perceived that her remark was not in keeping with the nature
of the proceedings, and of the little drama he intended to act. Pursing
out his lips, and waving his hand, he solemnly addressed the boy.
“Waldo, it grieves me beyond expression to have to summon you for so
painful a purpose; but it is at the imperative call of duty, which I
dare not evade. I do not state that frank and unreserved confession will
obviate the necessity of chastisement, which if requisite shall be fully
administered; but the nature of that chastisement may be mitigated
by free and humble confession. Waldo, answer me as you would your own
father, in whose place I now stand to you; have you, or have you not,
did you, or did you not, eat of the peaches in the loft?”
“Say you took them, boy, say you took them, then he won’t beat you
much,” said the Dutchwoman, good-naturedly, getting a little sorry for
him.
The boy raised his eyes slowly and fixed them vacantly upon her, then
suddenly his face grew dark with blood.
“So, you haven’t got anything to say to us, my lad?” said Bonaparte,
momentarily forgetting his dignity, and bending forward with a little
snarl. “But what I mean is just this, my lad--when it takes a boy
three-quarters of an hour to fill a salt-pot, and when at three o’clock
in the morning he goes knocking about the doors of a loft, it’s natural
to suppose there’s mischief in it. It’s certain there is mischief in it;
and where there’s mischief in, it must be taken out,” said Bonaparte,
grinning into the boy’s face. Then, feeling that he had fallen from that
high gravity which was as spice to the pudding, and the flavour of the
whole little tragedy, he drew himself up. “Waldo,” he said, “confess to
me instantly, and without reserve, that you ate the peaches.”
The boy’s face was white now. His eyes were on the ground, his hands
doggedly clasped before him.
“What, do you not intend to answer?”
The boy looked up at them once from under his bent eyebrows, and then
looked down again.
“The creature looks as if all the devils in hell were in it,” cried Tant
Sannie. “Say you took them, boy. Young things will be young things; I
was older than you when I used to eat bultong in my mother’s loft, and
get the little niggers whipped for it. Say you took them.”
But the boy said nothing.
“I think a little solitary confinement might perhaps be beneficial,”
said Bonaparte. “It will enable you, Waldo, to reflect on the enormity
of the sin you have committed against our Father in heaven. And you may
also think of the submission you owe to those who are older and wiser
than you are, and whose duty it is to check and correct you.”
Saying this, Bonaparte stood up and took down the key of the fuel-house,
which hung on a nail against the wall.
“Walk on, my boy,” said Bonaparte, pointing to the door; and as he
followed him out he drew his mouth expressively on one side, and made
the lash of the little horsewhip stick out of his pocket and shake up
and down.
Tant Sannie felt half sorry for the lad; but she could not help
laughing, it was always so funny when one was going to have a whipping,
and it would do him good. Anyhow, he would forget all about it when the
places were healed. Had not she been beaten many times and been all the
better for it?
Bonaparte took up a lighted candle that had been left burning on the
kitchen table, and told the boy to walk before him. They went to the
fuel-house. It was a little stone erection that jutted out from the side
of the wagon-house. It was low and without a window, and the dried dung
was piled in one corner, and the coffee-mill stood in another, fastened
on the top of a short post about three feet high. Bonaparte took the
padlock off the rough door.
“Walk in, my lad,” he said.
Waldo obeyed sullenly; one place to him was much the same as another. He
had no objection to being locked up.
Bonaparte followed him in, and closed the door carefully. He put the
light down on the heap of dung in the corner, and quietly introduced his
hand under his coat-tails, and drew slowly from his pocket the end of a
rope, which he concealed behind him.
“I’m very sorry, exceedingly sorry, Waldo, my lad, that you should have
acted in this manner. It grieves me,” said Bonaparte.
He moved round toward the boy’s back. He hardly liked the look in the
fellow’s eyes, though he stood there motionless. If he should spring on
him!
So he drew the rope out very carefully, and shifted round to the wooden
post. There was a slipknot in one end of the rope, and a sudden movement
drew the boy’s hands to his back and passed it round them. It was an
instant’s work to drag it twice round the wooden post: then Bonaparte
was safe.
For a moment the boy struggled to free himself; then he knew that he was
powerless, and stood still.
“Horses that kick must have their legs tied,” said Bonaparte, as he
passed the other end of the rope round the boy’s knees. “And now, my
dear Waldo,” taking the whip out of his pocket, “I am going to beat
you.”
He paused for a moment. It was perfectly quiet; they could hear each
other’s breath.
“‘Chasten thy son while there is hope,’” said Bonaparte, “‘and let not
thy soul spare for his crying.’ Those are God’s words. I shall act as a
father to you, Waldo. I think we had better have your naked back.”
He took out his penknife, and slit the shirt down from the shoulder to
the waist.
“Now,” said Bonaparte, “I hope the Lord will bless and sanctify to you
what I am going to do to you.”
The first cut ran from the shoulder across the middle of the back; the
second fell exactly in the same place. A shudder passed through the
boy’s frame.
“Nice, eh?” said Bonaparte, peeping round into his face, speaking with a
lisp, as though to a very little child. “Nith, eh?”
But the eyes were black and lustreless, and seemed not to see him. When
he had given sixteen Bonaparte paused in his work to wipe a little drop
of blood from his whip.
“Cold, eh? What makes you shiver so? Perhaps you would like to pull up
your shirt? But I’ve not quite done yet.”
When he had finished he wiped the whip again, and put it back in his
pocket. He cut the rope through with his penknife, and then took up the
light.
“You don’t seem to have found your tongue yet. Forgotten how to cry?”
said Bonaparte, patting him on the cheek.
The boy looked up at him--not sullenly, not angrily. There was a wild,
fitful terror in the eyes. Bonaparte made haste to go out and shut the
door, and leave him alone in the darkness. He himself was afraid of that
look.
*****
It was almost morning. Waldo lay with his face upon the ground at the
foot of the fuel-heap. There was a round hole near the top of the door,
where a knot of wood had fallen out, and a stream of grey light came in
through it.
Ah, it was going to end at last. Nothing lasts forever, not even the
night. How was it he had never thought of that before? For in all that
long dark night he had been very strong, had never been tired, never
felt pain, had run on and on, up and down, up and down; he had not
dared to stand still, and he had not known it would end. He had been so
strong, that when he struck his head with all his force upon the stone
wall it did not stun him nor pain him--only made him laugh. That was a
dreadful night.
When he clasped his hands frantically and prayed--“O God, my beautiful
God, my sweet God, once, only once, let me feel you near me tonight!”
he could not feel him. He prayed aloud, very loud, and he got no answer;
when he listened it was all quite quiet--like when the priests of Baal
cried aloud to their god--“Oh, Baal, hear us! Oh, Baal, hear us! But
Baal was gone a-hunting.”
That was a long wild night, and wild thoughts came and went in it; but
they left their marks behind them forever: for, as years cannot pass
without leaving their traces behind them, neither can nights into which
are forced the thoughts and sufferings of years. And now the dawn was
coming, and at last he was very tired. He shivered and tried to draw the
shirt up over his shoulders. They were getting stiff. He had never known
they were cut in the night. He looked up at the white light that came
in through the hole at the top of the door and shuddered. Then he turned
his face back to the ground and slept again.
Some hours later Bonaparte came toward the fuel-house with a lump of
bread in his hand. He opened the door and peered in; then entered,
and touched the fellow with his boot. Seeing that he breathed heavily,
though he did not rouse, Bonaparte threw the bread down on the ground.
He was alive, that was one thing. He bent over him, and carefully
scratched open one of the cuts with the nail of his forefinger,
examining with much interest his last night’s work. He would have to
count his sheep himself that day; the boy was literally cut up. He
locked the door and went away again.
“Oh, Lyndall,” said Em, entering the dining room, and bathed in tears,
that afternoon, “I have been begging Bonaparte to let him out, and he
won’t.”
“The more you beg the more he will not,” said Lyndall.
She was cutting out aprons on the table.
“Oh, but it’s late, and I think they want to kill him,” said Em, weeping
bitterly; and finding that no more consolation was to be gained from her
cousin, she went off blubbering--“I wonder you can cut out aprons when
Waldo is shut up like that.”
For ten minutes after she was gone Lyndall worked on quietly; then she
folded up her stuff, rolled it tightly together, and stood before the
closed door of the sitting room with her hands closely clasped. A flush
rose to her face: she opened the door quickly, and walked in, went to
the nail on which the key of the fuel-room hung. Bonaparte and Tant
Sannie sat there and saw her.
“What do you want?” they asked together.
“This key,” she said, holding it up, and looking at them.
“Do you mean her to have it?” said Tant Sannie in Dutch.
“Why don’t you stop her?” asked Bonaparte in English.
“Why don’t you take it from her?” said Tant Sannie.
So they looked at each other, talking, while Lyndall walked to the
fuel-house with the key, her underlip bitten in.
“Waldo,” she said, as she helped him to stand up, and twisted his arm
about her waist to support him, “we will not be children always; we
shall have the power, too, some day.” She kissed his naked shoulder with
her soft little mouth. It was all the comfort her young soul could give
him.