The Shadow of the Past Part 9

"Mr Matheson is a friend of Mr Holman," her mother explained.

Honor's smile became more friendly.

"You ought to have told me that at the beginning," she said. "It makes a difference."

"Isn't that a little rough on me?" he asked.

"I don't see that. It's an introduction. Mr Holman is a good friend.

It is a long time already that we have known him."

"Honor has known Mr Holman since she was a child," Mrs Krige interposed. "That was before we came to Benfontein, when we lived in the town. Lately we have seen little of him. Andreas, I expect Mr Matheson would like to go to his room. We shall have supper shortly.

If you are only half as hungry as I was the first time I drove across the flats," she added, turning again towards the guest, "you must be very ready for it."

Alone in the plainly furnished bedroom, dominated by the great four-poster, which recalled gruesome suggestions of a hea.r.s.e, Matheson fell to thinking pleasantly about Honor Krige. It was extraordinary what a change the sight of her had put upon the face of things. He no longer experienced boredom at the prospect of spending a week, or even two weeks, at the farm. He hoped the reply to Holman's communication would be delayed--the nature of the communication no longer mattered.

Of what account was the overthrow of governments, or other and more wily knavery, when set off against daily intercourse and companionship with beauty's self? He felt equal at the moment to partic.i.p.ating in a crime if to do so were to win a smile of genuine appreciation from Honor Krige. Not that he imagined Honor, or any member of her family, to be steeped in infamy. If the brother were a political firebrand, he doubted that the women were infected with the disorder. They seemed to be quiet and homely folk.

The Kriges meanwhile were discussing him, while Honor and a little Kaffir girl laid the table for the supper which Freidja Krige was cooking.

"He is nice looking," observed Honor, having dispatched Koewe to the kitchen for plates. "I am going to be nice to him."

"Don't be too nice," advised her brother drily. "We do not know anything about him. We must be discreet."

"He is a friend of Mr Holman," she urged, as if that const.i.tuted a claim to their consideration.

"He only comes on business from Mr Holman," he said. "It is best not to be hasty."

Mrs Krige glanced swiftly at her son.

"Andreas," she said, "is he on political business for Mr Holman?"

"As a messenger only. He brought me a letter."

"Mr Holman would not send any but a trustworthy messenger," she replied, and became silent as the Kaffir girl returned with the plates, and set them in a pile on the table for Honor to arrange.

"Place the chairs, Koewe," said Honor--"straight, picannin schelm. That will do. Now go and help young missis in the kitchen."

She swung round and faced her brother.

"What does Mr Holman say about him?" she asked.

"Very little," Krige answered in his deliberate way. "I gather from the letter that he trusts him simply because he is new to the country, and has no knowledge of Dutch."

"Ah!" said Honor, and gazed thoughtfully through the open window out upon the dried-up garden. "I wonder why he should carry letters for Mr Holman?" she mused.

CHAPTER TEN.

It was possible that Andreas Krige was a man of many ideas; he was not a man of many words. For the better part of an hour Matheson sat on the stoep and smoked in company with him, and waited in confident expectancy for the remark which, he calculated roughly, fell on an average once in every fifteen minutes from Krige's lips. The remark, when it came, was not profound. His own conversational efforts partook of the nature of a monologue, which Krige punctuated at long intervals with grunts; a short grunt fitting like a comma into a pause, and a longer grunt putting a period to the talk. He emerged from these periods usually with one of his infrequent observations.

It occurred to Matheson later, thinking over that quiet hour on the stoep, that Krige, by his silence and those occasional sympathetic grunts, had deliberately encouraged him to talk, had indeed urged him on to talk while observing himself an intentional reticence. But this did not strike him at the time, perhaps because his mind was so intent on Honor Krige, whom he could hear moving about inside the room they had left by means of the long window near which their chairs were placed, that it held no s.p.a.ce for other reflection.

He wondered why the women did not come out and join them. He wanted to talk to Honor, who was bright and animated and decidedly more companionable than her dark and silent brother. Krige did not interest him. And yet the long, loose-limbed figure reclining in the chair appealed to him as symbolic of the silence, the secrecy, the rugged simplicity of the veld, which daily exacted from him so much of energy and sweat and labour, and yielded its grudging return, rather as the man himself drew out of others more than he ever gave. The nature of the veld was in his blood. That is a characteristic of the Boer; he is as much a part of the soil as the coloured man, when it comes to wide s.p.a.ces--to the veld which he has named. Krige suggested the solitudes, and the rude and primitive toil which Adam bequeathed his sons.

One thing he said during their talk stuck in Matheson's memory. It was the least simple remark he had made.

"We do not get many engineers this way," he said. "To-morrow I will ask you to lode at the wells. That windmill you see from here is out of order."

It was rather a cute way, Matheson decided, of testing the truth of his claim to his profession.

After a while Mrs Krige emerged from the house with her elder daughter, and the talk became general and more ready. But still it seemed to Matheson that without Honor the party was not so much incomplete as lifeless: her presence made for him the atmosphere of the place.

And then, quite unexpectedly and silently, she appeared among them, and stood in the open window of the sitting-room, leaning her shoulder against the frame. She came so softly to the window, and took up her position there without remark, that Matheson realised her presence only through that extra sense which apprises one of the nearness of another person through the medium of a wordless transmission of thought. He turned his head abruptly, and found her behind him, and stood up. Their eyes met. In the dusk amid the shadows of the unlighted room behind her she suggested to his imagination, in her pale and slender beauty, a moon's ray--the night seemed lighter for her coming.

"Please sit down again," she said without moving.

"But I can't sit while you stand," he returned. "Come and take my chair."

"Thank you; but if I wanted to sit I should bring a chair with me--there is one at my back. If you won't sit down again you will oblige me to go in."

He resumed his seat with a promptness which was a sufficient guarantee of his unwillingness to provoke her into acting as she proposed, and at the same time he moved it so that without turning he could see her where she stood. He rather liked to see her there so close to him in the dusk. It was immaterial whether she talked; to sit and watch her was so good in itself. But Honor did not remain silent long.

"What do you think of our Karroo nights?" she asked in her quiet, intense voice.

"You have put a difficult question," he returned. "It is so impossible to express what one feels without seeming extravagant. A night like this is--just wonderful. There's something... I can't put it into words... it grips."

She smiled suddenly and leaned forward looking into the night.

"I have a feeling when I stand here," she said, "and look away across the veld into the deep purple and primrose of the evening sky, that I am gazing into the heart of Africa--a heart which opens and reveals many things. The past unfolds like a picture before the mind. I wonder if you will ever see into the heart of the veld? ... I wonder whether any Englishman could look so deep?"

"But surely," he protested, "many Englishmen have loved this land?"

"Coveted, not loved," she insisted. "Does one ever hurt what one loves?"

In his surprise he forgot that the speaker was herself partly English, that her mother, a silent listener to their talk, was a compatriot of his own. His patriotism was aroused by this aspersion; as the sole representative of his country, he was bound to meet and repudiate it.

"I think your attack is most unjust," he said, a shade of resentment in his tones. "If you reflect a while I believe you will admit as much.

Great Britain has done more for this country than any other nation."

"She has annexed land," the cool, dispa.s.sionate voice admitted--"she continues to annex. Wherever we have settled, she has followed and turned us out. She can do this--because of the power behind,--her strength lies across the seas."

"Oh, come!" he said, and regretted his ignorance of South African history. "It is quite elementary knowledge that the Netherlands sold the Cape Colony to Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century."

A cold little smile crossed her features.

"Oh! yes," she said; "we were sold--we know that--after hundreds of us had bled for the land. They sold us because they knew they couldn't hold the land. Then we left the colony which we had founded at the Cape a century and a half before, and trekked as far as Natal. When we had made that colony, the British annexed it... It was always trekking and then annexation and then trekking once more. We left the coast and struck inland, and crossed the Orange River in search anew of a home.

Again we were driven on--beyond the Vaal. There we founded our Republic."

The low, evenly modulated voice never raised its tones, but an increasing bitterness crept into them at this point.

"The Transvaal was rich in minerals. That was sufficient. The Transvaal was annexed by the British. But the Boers were stronger now, and they could endure this persecution no longer. They fought for their Republic, and bought it again dearly with their blood at Majuba Hill.