The Story of an African Farm Part 27

He spoke with that extreme gravity common to all very young things who feel deeply. It is not till twenty that we learn to be in deadly earnest and to laugh. The stranger nodded, while the fellow sought for something more to relate. He would tell all to this man of his--all that he knew, all that he had felt, his inmost sorest thought. Suddenly the stranger turned upon him.

"Boy," he said, "you are happy to be here."

Waldo looked at him. Was his delightful one ridiculing him? Here, with this brown earth and these low hills, while the rare wonderful world lay all beyond. Fortunate to be here?

The stranger read his glance.

"Yes," he said; "here with the karoo-bushes and red sand. Do you wonder what I mean? To all who have been born in the old faith there comes a time of danger, when the old slips from us, and we have not yet planted our feet on the new. We hear the voice from Sinai thundering no more, and the still small voice of reason is not yet heard. We have proved the religion our mothers fed us on to be a delusion; in our bewilderment we see no rule by which to guide our steps day by day; and yet every day we must step somewhere."

The stranger leaned forward and spoke more quickly. "We have never once been taught by word or act to distinguish between religion and the moral laws on which it has artfully fastened itself, and from which it has sucked its vitality. When we have dragged down the weeds and creepers that covered the solid wall and have found them to be rotten wood, we imagine the wall itself to be rotten wood too. We find it is solid and standing only when we fall headlong against it. We have been taught that all right and wrong originate in the will of an irresponsible being.

It is some time before we see how the inexorable 'Thou shalt and shalt not,' are carved into the nature of things. This is the time of danger."

His dark, misty eyes looked into the boy's.

"In the end experience will inevitably teach us that the laws for a wise and n.o.ble life have a foundation infinitely deeper than the fiat of any being, G.o.d or man, even in the groundwork of human nature.

"She will teach us that whoso sheddeth man's blood, though by man his blood be not shed, though no man avenge and no h.e.l.l await, yet every drop shall blister on his soul and eat in the name of the dead. She will teach that whoso takes a love not lawfully his own, gathers a flower with a poison on its petals; that whoso revenges, strikes with a sword that has two edges--one for his adversary, one for himself; that who lives to himself is dead, though the ground is not yet on him; that who wrongs another clouds his own sun; and that who sins in secret stands accursed and condemned before the one Judge who deals eternal justice--his own all-knowing self.

"Experience will teach us this, and reason will show us why it must be so; but at first the world swings before our eyes, and no voice cries out, 'This is the way, walk ye in it!' You are happy to be here, boy!

When the suspense fills you with pain you build stone walls and dig earth for relief. Others have stood where you stand today, and have felt as you feel; and another relief has been offered them, and they have taken it.

"When the day has come when they have seen the path in which they might walk, they have not the strength to follow it. Habits have fastened on them from which nothing but death can free them; which cling closer than his sacerdotal sanctimony to a priest; which feed on the intellect like a worm, sapping energy, hope, creative power, all that makes a man higher than a beast--leaving only the power to yearn, to regret, and to sink lower in the abyss.

"Boy," he said, and the listener was not more unsmiling now than the speaker, "you are happy to be here! Stay where you are. If you ever pray, let it be only the one old prayer--'Lead us not into temptation.'

Live on here quietly. The time may yet come when you will be that which other men have hoped to be and never will be now."

The stranger rose, shook the dust from his sleeve, and ashamed at his own earnestness, looked across the bushes for his horse.

"We should have been on our way already," he said. "We shall have a long ride in the dark tonight."

Waldo hastened to fetch the animal; but he returned leading it slowly.

The sooner it came the sooner would its rider be gone.

The stranger was opening his saddlebag, in which were a bright French novel and an old brown volume. He took the last and held it out to the boy.

"It may be of some help to you," he said, carelessly. "It was a gospel to me when I first fell on it. You must not expect too much; but it may give you a centre round which to hang your ideas, instead of letting them lie about in a confusion that makes the head ache. We of this generation are not destined to eat and be satisfied as our fathers were; we must be content to go hungry."

He smiled his automaton smile, and reb.u.t.toned the bag. Waldo thrust the book into his breast, and while he saddled the horse the stranger made inquiries as to the nature of the road and the distance to the next farm.

When the bags were fixed, Waldo took up his wooden post and began to fasten it on to the saddle, tying it with the little blue cotton handkerchief from his neck. The stranger looked on in silence. When it was done the boy held the stirrup for him to mount.

"What is your name?" he inquired, ungloving his right hand when he was in the saddle.

The boy replied:

"Well, I trust we shall meet again some day, sooner or later."

He shook hands with the ungloved hand; then drew on the glove, and touched his horse, and rode slowly away. The boy stood to watch him.

Once when the stranger had gone half across the plain he looked back.

"Poor devil," he said, smiling and stroking his moustache. Then he looked to see if the little blue handkerchief were still safely knotted.

"Poor devil!"

He smiled, and then he sighed wearily, very wearily.

And Waldo waited till the moving speck had disappeared on the horizon; then he stooped and kissed pa.s.sionately a hoof-mark in the sand. Then he called his young birds together, and put his book under his arm, and walked home along the stone wall. There was a rare beauty to him in the suns.h.i.+ne that evening.

Chapter 2.III. Gregory Rose Finds His Affinity.

The new man, Gregory Rose, sat at the door of his dwelling, his arms folded, his legs crossed, and a profound melancholy seeming to rest over his soul. His house was a little square daub-and-wattle building, far out in the karoo, two miles from the homestead. It was covered outside with a sombre coating of brown mud, two little panes being let into the walls for windows. Behind it were the sheep-kraals, and to the right a large dam, now princ.i.p.ally containing baked mud. Far off the little kopje concealed the homestead, and was not itself an object conspicuous enough to relieve the dreary monotony of the landscape.

Before the door sat Gregory Rose in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, on a camp-stool, and ever and anon he sighed deeply. There was that in his countenance for which even his depressing circ.u.mstances failed to account. Again and again he looked at the little kopje, at the milk-pail at his side, and at the brown pony, who a short way off cropped the dry bushes--and sighed.

Presently he rose and went into his house. It was one tiny room, the whitewashed walls profusely covered with prints cut from the "Ill.u.s.trated London News", and in which there was a noticeable preponderance of female faces and figures. A stretcher filled one end of the hut, and a rack for a gun and a little hanging looking-gla.s.s diversified the gable opposite, while in the centre stood a chair and table. All was scrupulously neat and clean, for Gregory kept a little duster folded in the corner of his table-drawer, just as he had seen his mother do, and every morning before he went out he said his prayers, and made his bed, and dusted the table and the legs of the chairs, and even the pictures on the wall and the gun-rack.

On this hot afternoon he took from beneath his pillow a watch-bag made by his sister Jemima, and took out the watch. Only half past four! With a suppressed groan he dropped it back and sat down beside the table.

Half-past four! Presently he roused himself. He would write to his sister Jemima. He always wrote to her when he was miserable. She was his safety-valve. He forgot her when he was happy; but he used her when he was wretched.

He took out ink and paper. There was a family crest and motto on the latter, for the Roses since coming to the colony had discovered that they were of distinguished lineage. Old Rose himself, an honest English farmer, knew nothing of his n.o.ble descent; but his wife and daughter knew--especially his daughter. There were Roses in England who kept a park and dated from the Conquest. So the colonial "Rose Farm" became "Rose Manor" in remembrance of the ancestral domain, and the claim of the Roses to n.o.ble blood was established--in their own minds at least.

Gregory took up one of the white, crested sheets; but on deeper reflection he determined to take a pink one, as more suitable to the state of his feelings. He began:

"Kopje Alone,

"Monday afternoon.

"My Dear Jemima--"

Then he looked up into the little gla.s.s opposite. It was a youthful face reflected there, with curling brown beard and hair; but in the dark blue eyes there was a look of languid longing that touched him. He re-dipped his pen and wrote:

"When I look up into the little gla.s.s that hangs opposite me, I wonder if that changed and sad face--"

Here he sat still and reflected. It sounded almost as if he might be conceited or unmanly to be looking at his own face in the gla.s.s. No, that would not do. So he looked for another pink sheet and began again.

"Kopje Alone, "Monday afternoon.

"Dear Sister,--It is hardly six months since I left you to come to this spot, yet could you now see me I know what you would say, I know what mother would say--'Can that be our Greg--that thing with the strange look in his eyes?'

"Yes, Jemima, it is your Greg, and the change has been coming over me ever since I came here; but it is greatest since yesterday. You know what sorrows I have pa.s.sed through, Jemima; how unjustly I was always treated at school, the masters keeping me back and calling me a blockhead, though, as they themselves allowed, I had the best memory of any boy in the school, and could repeat whole books from beginning to end. You know how cruelly father always used me, calling me a noodle and a milksop, just because he couldn't understand my fine nature. You know how he has made a farmer of me instead of a minister, as I ought to have been; you know it all, Jemima; and how I have borne it all, not as a woman, who whines for every touch, but as a man should--in silence.

"But there are things, there is a thing, which the soul longs to pour forth into a kindred ear.

"Dear sister, have you ever known what it is to keep wanting and wanting and wanting to kiss some one's mouth, and you may not; to touch some one's hand, and you cannot? I am in love, Jemima.

"The old Dutchwoman from whom I hire this place has a little stepdaughter, and her name begins with 'E'.