A Simpleton Part 54

"Well, but she is a mother, you say."

"Yes."

"Well, what mother could be just to a lunatic, with her own sweet angel babes to provide for?"

"That is true," said Dr. ----. "Maternal love is apt to modify the conscience."

"What I would do,--I would take her address, and make her promise to write if he gets well, and if he does get well then write to HIM, and tell him all about it."

Dr. ---- acted on this shrewd advice, and ordered a bundle to be made up for the traveller out of the hospital stores: it contained a nice light summer suit and two changes of linen.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Next morning, Staines and d.i.c.k Dale walked through the streets of Cape Town side by side. d.i.c.k felt the uneasiness of a sane man, not familiar with the mentally afflicted, who suddenly finds himself alone with one.

Insanity turns men oftenest into sheep and hares; but it does now and then make them wolves and tigers; and that has saddled the insane in general with a character for ferocity. Young Dale, then, cast many a suspicious glance at his comrade, as he took him along. These glances were rea.s.suring: Christopher's face had no longer the mobility, the expressive changes, that mark the superior mind; his countenance was monotonous: but the one expression was engaging; there was a sweet, patient, lamb-like look: the glorious eye a little troubled and perplexed, but wonderfully mild. d.i.c.k Dale looked and looked, and his uneasiness vanished. And the more he looked, the more did a certain wonder creep over him, and make him scarce believe the thing he knew; viz., that a learned doctor had saved him from the jaws of death by rare knowledge, sagacity, courage, and skill combined: and that mighty man of wisdom was brought down to this lamb, and would go north, south, east, or west, with sweet and perfect submission, even as he, d.i.c.k Dale, should appoint. With these reflections honest d.i.c.k felt his eyes get a little misty, and, to use those words of Scripture, which nothing can surpa.s.s or equal, his bowels yearned over the man.

As for Christopher, he looked straight forward, and said not a word till they cleared the town; but when he saw the vast flowery vale, and the far-off violet hills, like Scotland glorified, he turned to d.i.c.k with an ineffable expression of sweetness and good fellowship, and said, "Oh, beautiful! We'll hunt the past together."

"We--will--SO," said d.i.c.k, with a st.u.r.dy and indeed almost a stern resolution.

Now, this he said, not that he cared for the past, nor intended to waste the present by going upon its predecessor's trail; but he had come to a resolution--full three minutes ago--to humor his companion to the top of his bent, and say "Yes" with hypocritical vigor to everything not directly and immediately destructive to him and his.

The next moment they turned a corner and came upon the rest of their party, hitherto hidden by the apricot hedge and a turning in the road.

A blue-black Kafir, with two yellow Hottentot drivers, man and boy, was harnessing, in the most primitive mode, four horses on to the six oxen attached to the wagon; and the horses were flattening their ears, and otherwise resenting the incongruity. Meantime a fourth figure, a colossal young Kafir woman, looked on superior with folded arms, like a sable Juno looking down with that absolute composure upon the struggles of man and other animals, which Lucretius and his master Epicurus a.s.signed to the Divine nature. Without jesting, the grandeur, majesty, and repose of this figure were unsurpa.s.sable in nature, and such as have vanished from sculpture two thousand years and more.

d.i.c.k Dale joined the group immediately, and soon arranged the matter.

Meantime, Phoebe descended from the wagon, and welcomed Christopher very kindly, and asked him if he would like to sit beside her, or to walk.

He glanced into the wagon; it was covered and curtained, and dark as a cupboard. "I think," said he, timidly, "I shall see more of the past out here."

"So you will, poor soul," said Phoebe kindly, "and better for your health: but you must not go far from the wagon, for I'm a fidget; and I have got the care of you now, you know, for want of a better. Come, Ucatella; you must ride with me, and help me sort the things; they are all higgledy-piggledy." So those two got into the wagon through the back curtains. Then the Kafir driver flourished his kambok, or long whip, in the air, and made it crack like a pistol, and the horses reared, and the oxen started and slowly bored in between them, for they whinnied, and kicked, and spread out like a fan all over the road; but a flick or two from the terrible kambok soon sent them bleeding and trembling and rubbing shoulders, and the oxen, mildly but persistently goring their recalcitrating haunches, the intelligent animals went ahead, and revenged themselves by breaking the harness. But that goes for little in Cape travel.

The body of the wagon was long and low and very stout. The tilt strong and tight-made. The roof inside, and most of the sides, lined with green baize. Curtains of the same to the little window and the back. There was a sort of hold literally built full of purchases; a small fireproof safe; huge blocks of salt; saws, axes, pickaxes, adzes, flails, tools innumerable, bales of wool and linen stuff, hams, and two hundred empty sacks strewn over all. In large pigeon-holes fixed to the sides were light goods, groceries, collars, glaring cotton handkerchiefs for Phoebe's aboriginal domestics, since not every year did she go to Cape Town, a twenty days' journey by wagon: things dangled from the very roof; but no hard goods there, if you please, to batter one's head in a spill. Outside were latticed grooves with tent, tent-poles, and rifles.

Great pieces of cork, and bags of hay and corn, hung dangling from mighty hooks--the latter to feed the cattle, should they be compelled to camp out on some sterile spot on the Veldt, and methinks to act as buffers, should the whole concern roll down a nullah or little precipice, no very uncommon incident in the blessed region they must pa.s.s to reach Dale's Kloof.

Harness mended; fresh start. The Hottentots and Kafir vociferated and yelled, and made the unearthly row of a dozen wild beasts wrangling: the horses drew the bullocks, they the wagon; it crawled and creaked, and its appendages wobbled finely.

Slowly they creaked and wobbled past apricot hedges and detached houses and huts, and got into an open country without a tree, but here and there a stunted camel-thorn. The soil was arid, and grew little food for man or beast; yet, by a singular freak of nature, it put forth abundantly things that here at home we find it harder to raise than homely gra.s.s and oats; the ground was thickly clad with flowers of delightful hues; pyramids of snow or rose-color bordered the track; yellow and crimson stars bejewelled the ground, and a thousand bulbous plants burst into all imaginable colors, and spread a rainbow carpet to the foot of the violet hills; and all this glowed, and gleamed, and glittered in a sun shining with incredible brightness and purity of light, but, somehow, without giving a headache or making the air sultry.

Christopher fell to gathering flowers, and interrogating the past by means of them; for he had studied botany: the past gave him back some pitiably vague ideas. He sighed. "Never mind," said he to d.i.c.k, and tapped his forehead: "it is here: it is only locked up."

"All right," said d.i.c.k; "nothing is lost when you know where 'tis."

"This is a beautiful country," suggested Christopher. "It is all flowers. It is like the garden of--the garden of--locked up."

"It is de--light--ful," replied the self-compelled optimist st.u.r.dily.

But here nature gave way; he was obliged to relieve his agricultural bile by getting into the cart and complaining to his sister. "'Twill take us all our time to cure him. He have been bepraising this here soil, which it is only fit to clean the women's kettles. 'Twouldn't feed three larks to an acre, I know; no, NOR HALF SO MANY."

"Poor soul! mayhap the flowers have took his eye. Sit here a bit, d.i.c.k.

I want to talk to you about a many things."

While these two were conversing, Ucatella, who was very fond of Phoebe, but abhorred wagons, stepped out and stalked by the side, like an ostrich, a camelopard, or a Taglioni; nor did the effort with which she subdued her stride to the pace of the procession appear: it was the poetry of walking. Christopher admired it a moment; but the n.o.ble expanse tempted him, and he strode forth like a giant, his lungs inflating in the glorious air, and soon left the wagon far behind.

The consequence was that when they came to a halt, and d.i.c.k and Phoebe got out to release and water the cattle, there was Christopher's figure retiring into s.p.a.ce.

"Hanc rem aegre tulit Phoebe," as my old friend Livy would say. "Oh dear! oh dear! if he strays so far from us, he will be eaten up at nightfall by jackals, or lions, or something. One of you must go after him."

"Me go, missy," said Ucatella zealously, pleased with an excuse for stretching her magnificent limbs.

"Ay, but mayhap he will not come back with YOU: will he, d.i.c.k?"

"That he will, like a lamb." d.i.c.k wanted to look after the cattle.

"Yuke, my girl," said Phoebe, "listen. He has been a good friend of ours in trouble; and now he is not quite right HERE. So be very kind to him, but be sure and bring him back, or keep him till we come."

"Me bring him back alive, certain sure," said Ucatella, smiling from ear to ear. She started with a sudden glide, like a boat taking the water, and appeared almost to saunter away, so easy was the motion; but when you looked at the ground she was covering, the stride, or glide, or whatever it was, was amazing.

"She seem'd in walking to devour the way."

Christopher walked fast, but nothing like this; and as he stopped at times to botanize and gaze at the violet hills, and interrogate the past, she came up with him about five miles from the halting-place.

She laid her hand quietly on his shoulder, and said, with a broad genial smile, and a musical chuckle, "Ucatella come for you. Missy want to speak you."

"Oh! very well;" and he turned back with her, directly; but she took him by the hand to make sure; and they marched back peaceably, in silence, and hand in hand. But he looked and looked at her, and at last he stopped dead short, and said, a little arrogantly, "Come, I know YOU.

YOU are not locked up;" and he inspected her point-blank. She stood like an antique statue, and faced the examination. "You are 'the n.o.ble savage,'" said he, having concluded his inspection.

"Nay," said she. "I be the housemaid."

"The housemaid?"

"Iss, the housemaid, Ucatella. So come on." And she drew him along, sore perplexed.

They met the cavalcade a mile from the halting-place, and Phoebe apologized a little to Christopher. "I hope you'll excuse me, sir," said she, "but I am just for all the world like a hen with her chickens; if but one strays, I'm all in a flutter till I get him back."

"Madam," said Christopher, "I am very unhappy at the way things are locked up. Please tell me truly, is this 'the housemaid,' or 'the n.o.ble savage'?"

"Well, she is both, if you go to that, and the best creature ever breathed."

"Then she IS 'the n.o.ble savage'?"

"Ay, so they call her, because she is black."

"Then, thank Heaven," said Christopher, "the past is not all locked up."