A Vendetta of the Desert Part 4

"My mother bids me tell you that she is dying, and that you must come to her at once."

Gideon rose to his feet, his face twitching. Elsie slowly turned, held out her hand for the guiding twig which Kanu extended to her, and stepped swiftly forth.

Within the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes Gideon sprang on a horse and galloped off in the direction of the homestead where the woman he loved lay dying. Marta sent one of the servants to fetch a span of oxen, and soon followed her husband, in a wagon.

When Gideon arrived at Marta's homestead he could at once see that directions had been given as to the details of his reception. As he ascended the steep flight of steps which led to the _voorkuis_ the door swayed open and revealed the weeping figure of Sara, his niece. Walking on tip-toe she beckoned to him to follow her, and led the way to an inner room, the door of which stood ajar. Gideon entered, every nerve in his body tingling with apprehension. Sara softly closed the door behind him, and then he heard her retreating footsteps upon the clay floor of the pa.s.sage.

The dying woman lay propped up in bed, her cheeks flushed and her lips parted in a smile of loving welcome. She looked, for the moment, not more than twenty years of age. Her face carried Gideon back to the spring morning of long ago, when he met her for the first time, walking under the budding oaks of the Stellenbosch street. With a last, pathetic effort of coquetry, the poor remnant of her once-beautiful hair was spread over her shoulder. Her hand appeared for an instant from under the bed-clothes; it looked like the hand of a skeleton in a livid glove.

Gideon stood for a s.p.a.ce looking into the smiling eyes of the woman whom he loved and sunning himself in their dying glow. The soiled years seemed to shrivel away like a burnt-up scroll, the past lived again in a borrowed glamour of lost joy that had never existed and his withered heart expanded like a rose in summer.

With a long-drawn sigh he sank to his knees at the side of the bed and pressed his lips hurriedly upon the tress of silky hair; then he drew hurriedly back, startled at his own temerity. Marta turned her head slightly until she could see his face. Her eyes became softer with the dew of happiness and a smile hovered upon her lips. Then she spoke:

"Listen--I am dying;--will you take my children and care for them?"

Gideon could not speak; he nodded his head and she proceeded:

"I only knew you loved me when it was too late... I waited for you to speak--then they said that you loved someone else--"

Gideon's brain was busy recalling the long-past. Every obscure detail of the days of his brother's courts.h.i.+p and his own bitter disappointment came back to him with strange distinctness. How had the misunderstanding arisen; who was to blame?--"Stepha.n.u.s always hated you and I loved you all the time--Aletta need not know--I only tell you now that I am dying--"

Gideon tenderly took the wasted hand and laid it against his rugged cheek.

"My children--I love them--Let them not suffer for their father's sin--"

"Wait, Marta," said Gideon in a strained and trembling voice, "I must tell you--"

"There is nothing to tell--I know it all.--He got to know I loved you and he tried to kill you.--Forgive him, if you can, for my sake--"

"Wait, Marta,--I must tell you the truth--you are wrong--I must tell you the truth, even if it kills us both."

The dying woman's lips became compressed, and the colour began to fade from her cheeks. Gideon tried to move so that her eyes, full of startled interrogatory and the pain of apprehension, might not rest upon his face whilst he made his confession, but they followed and held his spell-bound. Then in a hoa.r.s.e, broken murmur he said:

"Stepha.n.u.s shot me by accident--I accused him falsely--because I hated him all my life."

When he ceased speaking he drooped his head and hid his face among the bed-clothes next to Marta's shoulder. A slight shudder went through the woman's frame and then she ceased to breathe. Gideon kept his head bowed for a long time. When, by a torturing effort he lifted it, he saw a dead, ashen face lying on the pillow at his side,--the face of an old woman who seemed to have died in sharp agony.

When Gideon left the chamber of death he moved like a man in a dream.

Mounting his horse mechanically he allowed the animal to stray homewards at a walk. He met the wagon in which Aletta was hurrying to the death-bed as fast as the team of oxen could bring her, but he pa.s.sed it without recognition.

The pathway led past the spring, the scene of the three-years' past tragedy. The day was hot and the horse turned, aside to drink as was its wont. It was not until the animal paused and bent its head to the water that the rider recognised the locality. He was quite calm and the environment in which he found himself seemed appropriate to his mood.

He dismounted when the horse had finished drinking, led it away to a spot where it could graze, a few paces distant, and then returned to the water-side.

He went over the whole scene anew. There was the spot where he had sat sleeping; he stepped over and sat there again, in the same att.i.tude.

There Stepha.n.u.s had approached through the bushes; yonder was the place where the struggle for possession of the gun had taken place and where he had ignominiously sunk to the ground beneath his brother's superior strength. A little to the right was the green tussock upon which Stepha.n.u.s, after wrenching the gun from his grasp, had stood and looked insulting defiance at him. He recalled the face which bore such a detestable resemblance to his own, and remembered its look of triumphant hate. He recalled the taunting words that Stepha.n.u.s had uttered and his own insulting reply. Again he felt the sickening torture of the cras.h.i.+ng bullet tearing through flesh and bone. Involuntarily he lifted quickly the half-crippled limb; a torturing twinge shot through it and almost made him scream.

His thoughts swung back--searching among the mists of old memory for a clue to the one that had wrecked his life by telling falsehoods about him to the woman he loved, and who, he now knew for the first time, had loved him. Who could it be? None but the brother whose life he had been fool enough to save and who had always been his evil genius.

The scene he had just lived through was too recent for him to take in its full significance. He knew that he had caused Marta's death by his confession--which he now bitterly regretted having made, and he wondered if they should meet in the next world whether she would hate him for what he had done. He had left the house of death with the full intention of confessing his transgression and expiating it in the fullest manner. It was not that he had made any resolution to this effect, but rather that a full confession, with its consequences, seemed to be the only possible outcome of what had happened.

Now, however, he determined to maintain silence. It was not that he dreaded the consequences of a confession to himself--his life was too full of misery for him to dread that--but rather that his somewhat waning hate of his brother had been reinforced by Marta's words, and he could not bring himself to abate a jot of that brother's bondage. Had it been possible to confess his sin without benefiting Stepha.n.u.s by so doing, he felt that he would have told his tale to the first human creature he met, were it only a Bushman.

He had saved his brother's life; it was not much, after all, to demand ten years of that life for the exigencies of his revenge. Stepha.n.u.s, of course, deserved his punishment richly. What business had he to interfere with the gun at all? Every despiteful act,--every provocative detail, every maddening annoyance to which Stepha.n.u.s had subjected him during the long, hate-blackened years of the feud, came back and grinned at him.

He found himself wondering whether anybody had been listening at the door when he made his confession, and the sudden dread of this contingency took precedence of every other consideration for the time.

Well,--if he had been overheard he would abide by the result and make a full confession; if not his lips should remain sealed.

After the funeral, which Gideon attended with outward calmness, Aletta remained at the homestead for a few days arranging for the removal of the two girls. Uncle Diederick, who had been called in professionally, but had arrived on the scene after Marta's death, said a simple prayer over the grave which was dug on the hill-side just behind the homestead.

Sara was convulsed with grief, but Elsie hardly shed a tear. She and her mother had always been strangers; now the blind child's utter ignorance of convention kept her from feigning a grief she did not feel.

Gideon's mind was now so far relieved, that he had no longer the fear of anyone having overheard his confession.

Uncle Diederick arranged to come and live at Stepha.n.u.s' farm and manage it for the benefit of the two children, until Stepha.n.u.s' release from prison. Accordingly, the "hartebeeste house" was abandoned--Jacomina having, in the meantime, carefully packed up all the drugs, herbs and surgical appliances in boxes and skin bags, and placed them in the wagon.

Thus, within a week of Marta's death Uncle Diederick and his daughter were settled in their new dwelling. For months afterwards weary invalids from a distance continued to arrive at the "hartebeeste house"

and to learn to their dismay that the physician had departed and left no address.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

HOW GIDEON WANDERED, AND HOW ELSIE OVERHEARD HIS PRAYER.

At the period at which the action of this story is laid the only settled parts of the Cape Colony lay well to the south of the rugged mountain chain, the eastern portion of which is called the "Roggeveld" or "Rye land." It was in a valley which cleft the range that the farm of the van der Walts was situated.

The Boer has ever been intolerant of near neighbours; he likes to feel that the utmost expanse his glance can sweep over is his, to use or neglect as suits him. He has a great objection to any habitation being within sight of his homestead.

For centuries the government tried to prevent the expansion of the Colony to a distance from the central authority at Cape Town, but the efforts were as useless as though one were to try to control quicksilver on a slanting board with the hand. The enactment of the most stringent laws was of no avail to prevent the more adventurous spirits from seeking their fortune in the vast, mysterious hinterland. Such men looked upon the heathen as their inheritance and on the wilderness as their portion.

Steadfast in his narrow faith, tenacious as steel to his limited purpose, valiant as any crusader that charged the Saracens on the plains of Palestine, the primitive Boer was of the texture of the strongest of the sons of the earth.

Such a typical Boer was Tyardt van der Waldt, the father of Stepha.n.u.s and Gideon. He had come to this lonely valley down which the yet-unpolluted Tanqua stream flowed through its waving sedges,--far beyond the camp of the boldest pioneer. His wagon was his castle of strength; he trusted in the Lord of Hosts, and he kept his powder religiously dry. He found hill and valley stocked with the great beasts of the desert, and on the blood of these he slaked his nature's needs, thanking G.o.d for the draught. Upon the mountain side roamed the n.o.ble eland; in the th.o.r.n.y copses the stately koodoo herded,--wild cattle with which Providence had stocked the pasture for his use. Here was his Canaan. More fortunate than Moses, he possessed it,--whilst vigour yet thrilled his foot and hand.

At night the deep-rumbling growl of the marauding lion would be heard in the scrub below the cattle-kraal, and the trembling touch of wife and children as they clung to him, made the strong man rejoice in his strength. Every considerable mountain-cave harboured his Amalekite, the Bushman,--and him he hewed in pieces before the Lord whenever opportunity offered.

To the Northward of the Roggeveld the wide and usually waterless plains of what is yet known as Bushmanland stretched away indefinitely. Arid as these plains are, and apparently always have been, they supported an enormous amount of animal life. Many of the larger fauna of South Africa can exist for an indefinite time without drinking; some, such as the gemsbok or oryx, can dispense with it altogether, owing to the instinct which teaches them to dig for succulent tubers in the arid sand dunes, from the surface of which every vestige of vegetation may have disappeared.

Many a time had Tyardt van der Walt trekked over the mountain chain with his wagon and penetrated a few days' journey into the waste. Then he would return with a load of game of kinds different from those found among the mountains. A sense of danger, which is the salt of life to some natures, lent zest to these expeditions. This danger was by no means imaginary; the bones of many an adventurous Boer have been gnawed by the jackals of Bushmanland.

Gideon had, as a boy, accompanied his father upon some of the later of these expeditions. Now, when his load of unrecognised remorse hung heavily upon him, he sighed his tired soul towards the vast and vague unknown which lay, rich in the glamour of the unknown and the mysterious, beyond the frowning mountain rampart. There, he had come to think, Peace must surely have her habitation; into that solitude the ghosts of men and things could not follow. He put his wagon in order, loaded it with provisions and ammunition enough to last for several months, and went forth into the wilderness.

Aletta, reminiscent of disasters, opposed the idea, but Gideon was not to be withheld from his purpose. The mind of the unhappy wife, in whose heart love for her husband still dwelt, in spite of half a lifetime of neglect, was full of apprehension. Many were the current tales of Boers who had gone northward upon hunting trips, as her husband was now about to go, and who never again had been heard of. Lured by the fugacious verdure upon the s.h.i.+ning track of some vagrant thunderstorm which had filled the "pans" with water, and made them look like silver s.h.i.+elds strewn upon some tourney-field of the G.o.ds, they had ventured farther and farther, forgetting that the thirsty sun was busy behind them, drinking up the moisture and cutting off their retreat. Other narratives told of cheerful camp-fires with men sitting around them, tired after a long day's hunting. Suddenly would come a silent flight of deadly arrows. Then would the fires be hurriedly quenched, and a volley fired at random into the darkness in the vain hope of smiting a foe as subtle as a serpent, as nimble as a swallow and as noiseless as a ghost. Afterwards the homeward struggle of a few desperate survivors,-- those still unwounded trying to alleviate the agony of their dying comrades, well knowing that their every step would be doggedly followed by an implacable enemy, seeking a fitting opportunity of inflicting further slaughter by the same cruel means.

However, after Gideon's departure, life at Elandsfontein took on a deep peacefulness. The reaction from the constant dread of violence on Gideon's part was such a relief that something like happiness seemed as though it were about to dawn upon the stricken home.

Aletta learned, to her surprise, that the domestic relations in Stepha.n.u.s' household had never been satisfactory. Bit by bit she learned from Sara things which threw a strange light upon Marta's home life. It appeared that for the past two years Marta had not been right in her mind. She had been in the habit of sitting silent and alone for days together, not answering when spoken to, and refusing to eat. Ever since her husband's conviction she had manifested the strongest objection to his name being mentioned. This had naturally had the effect of estranging Elsie completely from her. Even Sara, to whom the mother had formerly been pa.s.sionately attached, had recently been treated with indifference.

The two girls now seemed to find in the woman who had always. .h.i.therto been lonely, what they had missed in their own mother. Aletta had always felt the greatest pity for Stepha.n.u.s; knowing, as she did, the provocation he had sustained, and the rancour Gideon had shown. A sympathetic bond was thus set up between the three, and the ever-present sorrow was shorn of some of its more painful features.