Chapter Nine.
It was manifest to Matheson on his arrival at Benfontein that he was not expected. He had taken it for granted that Holman would inform these people of his coming, and instead he found it necessary to explain himself to the swarthy young Dutchman who came out of the house, when the cart drew up beside the big aloes that formed a hedge dividing the garden from the veld, and strolled leisurely forward with no great display of eagerness to receive the traveller. He descended from the Cape Cart and faced him.
“Is it Mr Krige?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied the Dutchman, and regarded him with something like distrust blended with dislike, and waited for further enlightenment.
“My name’s Matheson,” the visitor announced, and, perceiving that the name conveyed nothing to his listener, he added: “I thought Holman would have prepared you for my visit. Perhaps I had better give you his letter, which will explain things.”
He felt in his pocket for the letter, and presented it. Krige, taking it in the left hand, deliberately extended the right.
“That is all right,” he said. “I did not know. A friend of Mr Holman is very welcome.”
He spoke in Dutch to the coloured driver, who climbed down from the cart and started to take out the horses. One of Krige’s boys sauntered forward to his assistance; and a woman, who, judging from the likeness between them, was Krige’s sister, appeared on the shadeless stoep, and looked on with detached interest at the scene beyond the aloe hedge. Matheson judged her to be about thirty. She was swarthy, like her brother, with a deepening brown on the neck that suggested a strain of native blood somewhere in the Krige ancestry. Her eyes were very dark, and sombre in expression, which robbed them, as it robbed her face, of actual beauty, and lent both a tragic, almost a sullen air. Looking at her a stranger would pronounce unhesitatingly that hers had been a tragic life. At least it was a life which had known tragedy, and had nursed its bitterness throughout the years.
Krige conducted Matheson on to the stoep and presented him to his sister. From the way in which she unbent, as her brother had done, at the mention of Holman’s name, he concluded that in this household Holman was held in very warm regard. The mantle of his popularity descended in some measure upon himself.
“Come inside and rest,” said Miss Krige. “You will be hungry. We will be having supper just now.” She scrutinised him for a second. “I expect you are tired,” she added; “it’s a long drive from De Aar.”
He disclaimed undue fatigue, and followed her into the house, where bustling preparations were going forward in the guest chamber, which the younger girl had hastened to get ready as soon as the Cape Cart came within sight. The bed had to be made, and the room dusted. There were seldom visitors at Benfontein; and the great four-poster bedstead remained usually shrouded in dustsheets, under which the feather mattress humped itself protestingly, and fell into depressions where some heedless touch had deflated its bulging surface.
The younger Miss Krige, who was called Honor, treated the feather mattress as a conscientious cook might treat dough, the lightness of which depended on the energy of her kneading, with the result that the bed lost the appearance of an anaemic mountain and assumed quite reasonable dimensions of a sufficient flatness to warrant its claim to being a couch to repose upon. Then she fetched water and towels, and ran away to her own room to smooth her disordered hair, and, since her house frock was decidedly shabby, to make other alterations in her toilet calculated to improve her appearance, as her energetic ministrations had improved that of the bed. Honor took a greater interest in travellers than her sister. She was five years younger; and the sorrow which had touched their lives had touched hers more lightly, and left, not so much a bitterness, as a deliberately cultivated grievance to germinate in the furrows it had made.
Matheson was taken to the living-room, which struck him when he entered it as one of the pleasantest rooms he had ever seen—it was so essentially homelike. A blending of English and Dutch taste, and a feminine love of the beautiful, with inadequate resources at command, made the room in its bare cool simplicity invitingly restful and pleasing. There was not an article in it, save an old Dutch dresser, of any value. The dark, beeswaxed floor had no covering other than one or two golden jackal skins, shot, and roughly dressed, on the farm, and a large sheepskin mat. The chairs were reimpe bottomed, that is laced with strips of hide instead of cane, which makes a more durable and infinitely more comfortable seat. There were a few Madeira chairs with cushions in them, and a profusion of veld flowers, flowers in bowls and any available vessel—splashes of colour against the cool dark woodwork of the panelled walls.
In one of the low chairs a woman was seated, sewing. She looked about sixty, a well-preserved comely woman fair complexioned and essentially English in type. Her dear blue eyes met the blue eyes of the stranger with a cordial light of welcome in them, as she rose and came quickly forward and shook hands.
“We do not see many travellers at this season,” she remarked in her soft English voice, “which makes your visit doubly welcome. You have had a long drive.”
“Yes,” he said; “but the air is extraordinarily light. I didn’t find it too hot. It must be wonderful here in the spring.”
“It is,” she agreed. “The next time you come to Benfontein you must choose your season better. We aren’t always drought-stricken. We boast a fine climate really.”
“I think it’s topping,” he said. “And,”—he looked about him—“I think this is just the jolliest room I’ve ever seen.”
His wandering gaze, travelling critically about the room he professed such warm admiration for, was abruptly arrested when it reached the doorway, where it remained transfixed, caught by a vision of such surprising beauty that for quite an appreciable while he remained staring and speechless, until suddenly recalled to the present by the sound of Krige’s foot moved with some impatience on the wooden floor.
“It’s perfect,” he finished his encomium with, and faced his hostess again with an enigmatic smile. “I thought that as soon as I saw it.”
The vision hereupon entered through the doorway.
“My daughter, Honor,” Mrs Krige said.
The vision confronted Matheson now, a tall graceful girl, with bright hair that suggested the sunlight, and eyes that were like brown pools, dark and shadowed, and splashed with a lighter shade as though the sunlight penetrated here too and sported in their brown depths. It was a lovely face; Matheson found it flawless. He was amazed at her beauty, at the soft transparency of the fair skin, and her quiet self-possession. She held out a cool, aloof hand.
“You know all about me,” she said, “but no one enlightens me... English?—of course.”
He was not sure whether it was his imagination, but he fancied he detected some hostility in her voice as she pronounced his nationality. Her tones rang odd and rather hard.
“Matheson by name, cosmopolitan by disposition,” he returned easily—“like yourself.”
“Oh! I’m Dutch,” she said quickly.
“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 hearse, 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 participating 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 constituted 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.