The Second Class Passenger Part 36

Then Frikkie, the huge, the hairy, the heavy-footed, the man who prided himself on his ability to make circ.u.mstances, discovered, in a revealing flash, that he was, after all, a poor creature, and that the brightest being on earth was Katje Voss, whose people had settled about thirty miles off--next door, as it were. Katje held views not entirely dissimilar, but she consented to marry him, and the big youth walked on air. Katje was a dumpy Boer girl, with a face all cream and roses, and a figure that gave promise of much fat hereafter. Christina had imagined other things, but the ideal is a rickety structure, and she yielded; while David had never considered such an emergency, and consented heartily. Behind Frikkie's back he talked of grandchildren, and was exceedingly happy.

Then his dream-fabric tumbled about his ears.

Frikkie had ridden off to worship his beloved, and David and Christina, as was their wont, sat on the stoep. They' watched the figure of their son out of sight, and talked a while, and then lapsed into the silence of perfect companionship. The veldt was all about them, as silent and friendly as they, and the distance was mellow with a haze of heat. From the kraals came at intervals the voice of little Paul in fluent Kafir; David smiled over his pipe and nodded to his wife once when the boy's voice was raised in a shout. Christina was sewing; her thoughts were on Katje, and were still vaguely hostile.

Of a sudden she heard David's pipe clatter on the ground, and looked sharply round at him. He was staring intently into the void sky; his brows were knitted and his face was drawn; even as she turned he gave a hoa.r.s.e cry.

She rose quickly, but he rose too, and spoke to her in an unfamiliar voice.

"Go in," he said. "Have all ready, for our son has met with a mishap.

He has fallen from his horse."

She gasped, and stared at him, but could not speak.

"Go and do it," he said again, looking at her with hard eyes; and suddenly she saw, as by an inward light, that here was not madness, but truth. It spurred her.

"I will do it," she said swiftly. "But you will go and bring him in?"

"At once," he replied, and was away to the shed for the cart. The Kafirs came running to inspan the horses, and shrank from him as they worked. He was white through his tan, and he breathed loud. Little Paul saw him, and sat down on the ground and cried quietly.

Before David went his wife touched him on the arm, and he turned. She was white to the lips.

"David," she said, and struggled with her speech. "David."

"Well?" he answered, with a pregnant calm.

"David, he is not--not dead?"

"Not yet," he answered; "but I cannot say how it will be when I get there." A tenderness overwhelmed him, and he caught a great sob and put his arm about her. "All must be ready, little cousin. Time enough to grieve afterwards--all our lives, Christina, all our lives!"

She put her hand on his breast.

"All shall be ready, David," she answered. "Trust me, David."

He drove off, and she watched him lash the horses down the hill and force them at the drift--he, the man who loved horses, and knew them as he knew his children. His children! She fled into the house to do her office, and to drink to the bottom of the cup the bitterness of motherhood. A cool bed, linen, cold water and hot water, brandy and milk, all the insignia of the valley of the shadow did she put to hand, and con over and adjust and think upon, and then there was the waiting. She waited on the stoep, burning and tortured, boring at the horizon with dry eyes, and praying and hoping. A lifetime went in those hours, and the sun was slanting down before the road yielded, far and far away, a speck that grew into a cart going slowly. By and by she was able to see her husband driving, but n.o.body with him--only a rag or a garment that fluttered from the side. Her mind s.n.a.t.c.hed at it; was it--G.o.d! what was it?

David drove into the yard soberly; she was at the stoep.

"All is ready," she said, in a low voice. "Will you bring him in?"

"Yes," he said; and she went inside with her heart thrashing like a kicking horse.

David carried in his son in his arms; he was not yet past that. On the white bed inside they laid him, and where his fair head touched the pillow it dyed it red. Frikkie's face was white and blue, and his jaw hung oddly; but once he was within the door, some reinforcement of a.s.sociation came to Christina, and she went about her ministry purposefully and swiftly, a little comforted. At the back of her brain dwelt some idea such as this: here was her house, her home, there David, there Frikkie, here she, and where these were together Death could never make the fourth. The same thought sends a stricken child to its mother. David leant on the foot of the bed, his burning eyes on the face of his son, and his brows tortured with anxiety.

Christina brought some drink in a cup and held it to the still lips of the young man.

"Drink. Frikkie," she pleaded softly. "Drink, my kleintje. Only a drop, Frikkie, and the pain will fly away."

She spoke as though he were yet a child, for a mother knows nothing of manhood when her son lies helpless. The arts that made him a man shall keep him a man; so she coaxed the closed eyes and the dumb mouth.

But Frikkie would not drink, heard nothing, gave no sign. Christina laid drenched cloths to his forehead, deftly cleansed and bandaged the gaping rent in the base of the skull whence the life whistled forth, and talked to her boy all the while in the low crooning mother voice. David never moved from the foot of the bed, and never loosed his drawn brows. In came little Paul silently and took his hand, but he never looked down, and the father and the child remained there throughout the languid afternoon.

Evening cool was growing up when Frikkie opened his eyes. Christina was wetting towels for bandages, and her back was towards him, but she knew instantly, and came swiftly to his side. David leaned forward breathlessly, and little Paul cried out with the grip of his hand. They saw a waver of recognition in Frikkie's eyes, a fond light, and it seemed that his lips moved. Christina laid her ear to them.

"And--a--shod--horse!" murmured Frikkie. Nothing more. An hour after he was cold, and David was alone on the stoep, questioning pitiless skies and groping for G.o.d, while Christina knelt beside the bed within and wept blood from her soul.

They buried Frikkie in a little kraal on the hillside, and David made the coffin. When he nailed down the lid he was an old man; when the first red clod rang on it, he felt that life had emptied itself. When they were back in the house again, Christina turned to him.

"You knew," she said, in a strange voice--"you knew, but you could not save him." And she laughed aloud. David covered his face with his hands and groaned, but the next instant Christina's arms were about him.

Yet of their old life, before the deluge of grief, too much was happy to be all swamped. Time softened the ruggedness of their wound somewhat, and a day came when all the world was no longer black.

Little Paul helped them much, for what had once been Frikkie's was now his; and as he grew before their eyes, his young strength and beauty were a balm to them. David was much abroad in the lands now, for he was growing mealies and rapidly becoming a rich man; and as he rode oft in the morning and rode in at sundown, his new gravity of mind and mien broke up to the youngster who jumped at the stirrup with shouts and laughter, and demanded to ride on the saddle-bow. At intervals, also, Paul laid claim to a gun, to spurs, to a watch, to all the things that go in procession across a child's horizon, and Christina was not proof against the impulse to smile at him.

It is not to be thought, of course, that the shock of foreknowledge, of omnipotent vision, had left David scathless. Though the other details of the tragedy shared his memory, and elbowed the terrifying sense of revelation, he would find himself now and again peering at the future, straining to foresee, as a sailor bores at a fog-bank.

Then he would catch himself, and start back shuddering to the instant matters about him. Eventualities he could meet, but in their season and hand to hand; afar off they mastered him. Christina, too, dwelt on it at seasons; but, by some process of her woman's mind, it was less dreadful to her than to David: she, too, could dream at times.

One day she was at work within the house, and Paul ran in and out.

She spoke to him once about introducing an evil-smelling water- tortoise; he went forth to exploit it in the yard. From time to time his shrill voice reached her; then the frayed edges of David's black trousers of ceremony engaged her, to the exclusion of all else.

Between the scissors and the needle, at last, there stole on her ear a faint tap, tap--such a sound as water dropping on to a board makes.

It left her unconscious for a while, and then grew a little louder, with a note of vehemence. At last she looked up and listened. Tap, tap, it went, and she sprang from her chair and went to the stoep and looked out along the road. Far off on the hillside was a horse, ridden furiously on the downward road, and though dwarfed by the miles, she could see the rider flogging and his urgent crouch over the horse's withers. It was a picture of mad speed, of terror and violence, and struck her with a chill. Were the Kafirs risen? she queried. Was there war abroad? Was this mad rider her husband?

The last question struck her sharply, and she glanced about. Little Paul was sitting on a stone, plaguing the water-tortoise with a stick, and speaking to himself and it. The sight rea.s.sured her, and she viewed the rider again with equanimity. But now she was able to place him: it was David, and the horse was his big roan. The pace at which he rode was winding up the distance, and the hoofs no longer tap-tapped, but rang insistently. There was war, then; it could be nothing else. Her category of calamities was brief, and war and the death of her dear ones nearly exhausted it.

David galloped the last furlongs with a tightened rein, and froth snowed from the bit. He pulled up in the yard and slipped from the saddle. Christina saw again on his face the white stricken look and the furrowed frown that had stared on Frikkie's death. David stood with the bridle in his hand and the horse's muzzle against his arm and looked around. He saw Christina coming toward him with quick steps, and little Paul, abandoning the skellpot, running to greet him. He staggered and drew his hand across his forehead.

Christina had trouble to make him speak. "A dream," he kept saying, "an evil dream."

"A lying dream," suggested Christina anxiously.

"Yes," he hastened to add, "a lying dream."

"About--about little Paul?" was her timid question.

David was silent for a while, and then answered. "I saw him dead," he replied, with a shudder. "G.o.d! I saw it as plain as I saw him a moment ago in the kraal."

They heard the child's gleeful shout the same instant. "I've got you!

I've got you!" he cried from without.

"He has a water-tortoise," explained Christina with a smile. "Paul,"

she called aloud, "come indoors."

"Ja," shouted the child, and they heard him run up the steps of the stoep.

"Look," he said, standing at the door, "I found this in the gra.s.s.

What sort is it, father?"

David saw something lithe and sinuous in the child's hands, and stiffened in every limb. Paul had a skaapstikker in his grip, the green-and-yellow death-snake that abounds in the veldt. Its head lay on his arm, its pin-point eyes maliciously agleam, and the child gripped it by the middle. Christina stood petrified, but the boy laughed and dandled the reptile in glee.

"Be still, Paul," said David, in a voice that was new to him--"be still; do not move."