IV

There was a child in the tavern on the veld; it lay in an old orange-box,

half-filled with shavings, covered with a thin, worn blanket, in the

daub-and-wattle outhouse, where the Hottentot woman, called the

chambermaid, and the Kaffir woman, who was cook, slept together on one

filthy pallet. Sometimes they stayed up at the tavern, drinking and

carousing with the Dutch travellers who brought the supplies of Hollands

and Cape brandy and lager beer, and the American or English gold-miners

and German drummers who put up there from time to time. Then the child lay

in the outhouse alone. It was a frail, puny creature, always frightened

and silent. It lived on a little mealie pap and odd bits of roaster-cakes

that were thrown to it as though it were a dog. When the coloured women

forgot to feed it, they said: "It does not matter. Anyhow, the thing will

die soon!" But it lived on when another child would have died.... There

was something uncanny about its great-eyed silence and its tenacious hold

on life.

It had only been able to toddle when brought to the tavern. The rains and

thunderstorms of spring went by, the summer passed, and it could walk

about. It was a weakly little creature, with great frightened eyes,

amber-brown, with violet flecks in their black-banded irises, and dark,

thick lashes; and the delicately-drawn eyebrows were dark too, though its

hair was soft yellow--just the colour of a chicken's down. Many a cuff it

got, and many a hard word, when its straying feet brought it into the way

of the rough life up at the tavern. But still the scrap of food was tossed

to it, and the worn-out petticoat roughly cobbled into a garment for its

little body; for Bough was a charitable man.

It was a poor orphan, he explained to people, the child of a consumptive

emigrant Englishman who had worked for the landlord of the tavern, and

left this burden for other shoulders when he died. Charitable travellers

frequently left benefactions towards the little one's clothing and keep.

Bough willingly took charge of the money. The child strayed here, there,

and everywhere. It was often lost, but nobody looked for it, and it always

came back. It liked to climb the cairn of boulders, or to sit on the long,

low hillock at the cairn's foot. The wire fencing had long been removed

from the enclosure; it had gone to make a chicken-pen in a more suitable

spot. The cross had been taken down when a prop was wanted for the

clothes-line.

The child, often beaten by Bough and the woman of the tavern, might have

been even worse treated by the coloured servants but for those two graves

out on the veld. Black blood flows thick with superstition, and both the

Kaffir cook and the snuff-coloured Hottentot chambermaid nourished a

wholesome dread of spooks. Who knew but that the white woman's ghost would

rise out of the kopje there, some dark night, and pinch and cuff and thump

and beat people who had ill-used her bantling? As for the dead man buried

at her feet, his dim shape had often been seen by one of the Barala

stablemen, keeping guard before the heap of boulders, in the white blaze

of the moon-rays, or the paler radiance of a starry night, or more often

of a night of mist and rain; not moving as a sentry moves, but upright and

still, with shining fiery eyes in his shadowy face, and with teeth that

showed, as the dead grin. After that none of the servants would pass near

these two graves later than sundown, and Bough welted the Barala boy with

an ox-reim for scaring silly jades of women with lying tales. But then

Bough avoided the spot by day as well as by night. Therefore, it became a

constant place of refuge for the child, who now slept in the outhouse

alone.

In the long, brilliant winter nights she would leave the straw-stuffed

sack that had been her bed ever since the orange-box had been broken up,

and climb the stone-heaps, and look over the lonely veld, and stare up at

the great glowing constellation of the Southern Cross. In spring, when

pools and river-beds were full of foaming beer-coloured water, and every

kloof and donga was brimmed with flowers and ferns, she would be drawn

away by these, would return, trailing after her armfuls of rare blooms,

and thenceforward, until these faded, the ridgy grave-mound and the heaped

cairn of boulders would be gay with them. She never took them to the

house. It might have meant a beating--so many things did.

Late in November, when the apricots and plums and peaches were ripening on

the laden, starling-haunted boughs, she would wander in the orchard

belonging to the house, while the heavy drenching rains drummed on the

leaves overhead, and sudden furious thunderstorms rent the livid-coloured

clouds above with jagged scythes and reaping-hooks of white electric fire,

or leaping, dancing, playing, vanishing tongues of thin blue. Once this

fire struck a krantz, under the lee of which the child was sheltering, and

made a black scorched mark all down the cliff-face, but left the child

unscathed.

No one had ever taught her anything; no one had ever laid a gentle hand

upon her. When she first saw mother and daughter, friend and friend,

sweetheart and sweetheart kiss, it seemed to her that they licked each

other, as friendly dogs do. She had no name that she knew of.

"You kid, go there. You kid, fetch this or bring that. You kid, go to the

drift for water, or take the besom and sweep the stoep, or scrub out the

room there--do you hear, you kid?" These orders came thick and fast when

at last she was old enough to work; and she was old enough when she was

very young, and did work like a little beast of burden. A real mother's

heart--all mothers are not real ones--would have ached to see the dirt and

bruises on the delicate childish limbs, and the vermin that crawled under

the yellow rings of hair. How to be clean and tidy nobody had ever shown

her, though she had learned by instinct other things.

That it was best to bear hunger and pain in silence, lest worse befell.

That a truth for which one suffers is not as good as a lie for which one

gets a bigger roaster-cake, or the scrapings of the syrup-can. That to

little, weak, and feeble creatures of their race grown human beings can be

marvellously cruel. That the devil lived down in the kraals with the

natives, and that God was a swear. It is a wonder that she had not sunk

into idiocy, or hopelessly sickened and died, neglected, ill-used,

half-starved as she was. But when the little one might have been six years

of age, the Lady began coming. And after the first time, with very brief

intervals of absence, she came every night.

V

As soon as you lay down on the sack of straw in the corner of the

outhouse, slipping out of the ragged frock if the weather were hot, or

pulling the thin old horse-blanket over you if the night were a cold one,

keeping your eyes tight shut, for this was quite indispensable, you looked

into the thick dark, shot with gleams of lovely colours, sometimes with

whirling rings of stars, and gradually, as you looked, all these

concentrated into two stars, large and not twinkling, but softly radiant,

and you were happy, for you knew that the Lady was coming.

For she always came, even when you had been most wicked: when you were

sent to bed without even the supper-crust to gnaw, and when your body and

arms and legs were bruised and aching from the beating they told you you

deserved. The stars would go a long way off, and while you tingled and

trembled and panted with expectation, would come back again as eyes.

Looking up into them, you saw them clearly; the rest of the person they

belonged to arrived quite a little while after her eyes were there. Such

eyes--neither grey, nor brown, nor violet, but a mingling of all these

colours, and deepening as you gazed up into them into bottomless lakes of

love.

Then her face, framed in a soft darkness, which was hair--the Kid never

knew of what colour--her face formed itself out of the darkness that

framed those eyes, and a warm, balmy breath came nearer, and you were

kissed. No other lips, in your short remembrance, had ever touched you.

You had learned the meaning of a kiss only from her, and hers was so long

and close that your heart left off beating, and only began again when it

was over. Then arms that were soft and warm, and strong and beautiful,

came round you and gathered you in, and you fell asleep folded closely in

them, or you lay awake, and the Lady talked to you in a voice that was

mellow as honey and soft as velvet, and sounded like the cooing of the

wild pigeons that nested in the krantzes, or the sighing of the wind among

the high veld grasses, and the murmur of the little river playing among

the boulders and gurgling between the roots of the tree-fern. You talked,

too, and told her everything. And no matter how bad you had been, though

she was sorry, because she hated badness, she loved you just as dearly as

she did when you were good. And oh! how you loved her--how you loved her!

"Please," you said that night when she came first--you remember it quite

well, though it is so long ago--"please, why did you never come before?"

And she answered, with her cool, sweet, fragrant lips upon your eyelids,

and your head upon her breast:

"Because you never wanted me so much as now."

"Please take me back home with you," you begged, holding her fast. And she

answered in the voice that is always like the sigh of the wind amongst the

tree-tops and the murmur of the river:

"I cannot yet--but I will come again."

And she does come, and again and again. By degrees, though she comes to

you only at night, when the outhouse is dark, or lighted only by the stars

or the moonshine, you learn exactly what the Lady is like.

She wears a silken, softly-rustling gown that is of any lovely colour you

choose. The hue of the blue overarching sky at midday, or the tender rose

of dawn, or of the violet clouds that bar the flaming orange-ruby of the

sunset: or the mysterious robe of twilight drapes her, or her garment is

sable as the Night. The grand sweep of her shoulders and the splendid

pillar of her throat reveal the beauty of her form even to the eyes of an

untaught, neglected child. Her face is pale, but as full of sunlight as of

shadow, and her eyes are really grey and deep as mountain lakes. The

sorrow of all the world and all its joy seem to have rolled over her like

many waters, and when she smiles the sweetness of it is always almost more

than the Kid can bear.

Who is the Lady!

She has no other name than that. She is very, very good, as well as

beautiful, and you can bear to tell her when you have been most wicked,

because she is so sorry for you. She can play with you, and laugh so

softly and clearly and gaily that you, who have never learned but to dread

grown people's cruel merriment, join in and laugh too. When she laughs the

corners of her eyes crinkle so like the corners of her lips that you have

to kiss them, and there are dimples that come with the laughter, and make

her dearer than ever.

Who is the Lady, tall, and strong, and tender? That dead woman lying out

there under the Little Kopje was small, and slight, and frail. Who may the

Lady be? Is she a dream or a mere illusion born of loneliness and

starvation, physical and mental? Or has Mary, the Mother of Pity, laid

aside her girdle of decades of golden roses, her mantle of glory, and her

diadem of stars, and come stepping fair-footed down the stairway that

Night builds between Earth and Heaven, to comfort a desolate child lying

in a stable who never heard the story of the Christ-Babe of Bethlehem?

You ask no questions--you to whom she comes. You call her softly at night,

stretching out your arms, and the clasp of her arms answers at once. You

whisper how you love her, with your face hidden in her neck. The great

kind dark that brings her is your real, real daytime in which you live and

are glad. Each morning to which you waken, bringing its stint of hunger

and abuse and blows renewed, is only a dreadful dream, you say to

yourself, and so can face your world.

Oh, deep beyond fathoming, mysterious beyond comprehension is the hidden

heart of a child!