Chapter Eight.
Elsie’s Quest.
The excitement consequent upon the battle of Blauwberg and the conquest of the Cape by England had just died down, and the inhabitants of Cape Town were involuntarily coming to the conclusion that the English were not such stern tyrants as they had been led to expect.
Juffrouw du Plessis and her two daughters were sitting in their garden behind the oleander hedge, through an opening in which they could look out over the lovely expanse of Table Bay. The cottage, embowered in oak trees and with the north front covered by the soft green foliage of an immense vine, was built upon one of the terraces which lead up to the foot of Table Mountain, and which have, long since, been absorbed by the expanding city.
Behind the cottage the frowning crags of the massive mountain had hidden their rigour beneath the “Table Cloth” of snowy cloud, whose tossing, ever-changing folds and fringes were flung like foam into the blue vault of the sky by the boisterous “South-Easter” which had given it birth. But in spite of the turmoil overhead, no breath of rude air disturbed the halcyon quiet which seemed to have spread a wing of wardship over the dwelling.
An old slave who, notwithstanding his wrinkled skin and frosted hair, was still of powerful frame, was working with great deliberation among the flowers,—where large cabbage-roses lifted their heads high over violet-bordered beds that were sweet with mignonette and gay with pinks. The Juffrouw was of Huguenot descent and showed her French origin in the alertness of her movements and the sensibility of her features. She was the wife of a merchant who carried on a flourishing business in the city.
“Mother,” suddenly said Helena, the younger girl, “while you were out this morning I met a blind girl with the longest and yellowest hair I have ever seen.”
“A blind girl.—Where was she?”
“On the footpath behind the house.”
“And where did she come from?”
“I do not know; she would not tell me. I think she must be mad, for she said she was going to talk to the Governor and she asked me where he lived.”
“What an extraordinary thing.”
“Yes. She was walking with a little Hottentot man, who was leading her by means of a stick. She said they were both very hungry, so I gave them some bread and milk. I left them sitting at the side of the path, eating, and when I went back to look for them they were gone.”
Elsie and Kanu sat at the side of a stream in a deep ravine in the western face of the Drakenstein Mountain range. Around them was a mass of dense scrub which was gay with lovely flowers. The child drooped wearily as she sat with her swollen feet in the cool, limpid water. Her cheeks were faintly flushed, her lips parted, and her eyes shone with strange brilliancy. It was the morning of the sixth day after they had stolen away from Elandsfontein. Kanu looked gaunt with hunger. Famine seemed to glare out of his hollow eyes. In spite of the proverbial toughness of the Bushman, he was almost in the last stage of exhaustion. A belt made of twisted bark was tightly bound around his waist, and a bundle of grass and moss, rolled into a ball, was forced between it and his body, over the abdomen.
“Kanu,—how much farther do you think Cape Town is?” asked Elsie in a tired voice.
“I have heard the people say that the town lies under a big mountain with a flat top,” replied the Bushman,—“I can see such a mountain far away across the sand-flats. We will reach it to-morrow night if your feet do not get too sore.”
The child drew up her feet from out of the water and passed her fingers gently over them. Even this slight touch made her wince. She threw back her head with a movement of impatience. Her eyes were swimming in tears. Beside her, on the grass, lay a pair of tattered veldschoens.
“Kanu,—do you think we will reach there in time to see the Governor to-morrow night?”
“I do not know; we might not be able to find his house in the dark,—and perhaps he goes to bed early.”
“But, Kanu,—everyone must know the Governor’s house, so you can knock at the first door we pass and ask where it is.”
“Yes,—we can try.”
“But, Kanu,—I must get my father out of prison at once when we arrive. I am sure the Governor will come from his house and open the door as soon as I tell him,—even if he is in bed and asleep when we get there.”
“I do not think you will see Baas Stephanus to-morrow night,” replied the Bushman, after a pause.—“I heard from a man who had been there that the prison is not in Cape Town but in a place they call an island, in the sea.”
Elsie hid her face in her hands and burst into a passion of tears. She had held out against hunger and fatigue, against exposure to chilling rain and scorching sun, her thoughts strained to the conception of “Cape Town” as an objective. Often, when she was swaying with exhaustion, the words “father”—“Cape Town”—murmured half under her breath, would brace her flagging sinews. And now it was bitter to hear that her father was not in Cape Town after all, but farther off still. She had set her heart on meeting him immediately after her arrival. The Governor was sure to be a good, pitiful man;—otherwise the great king across the sea, who now owned the whole country, would not have sent him to rule the land. As soon as ever she had told her tale, he would tell one of his soldiers to take her down at once to the prison, which he would open with a big key. Then her father would look round and, seeing his little blind daughter, would know that she had saved him,—which was more than people with good eyesight had been able to do.
Over and over again the poor little child had rehearsed the scene of the meeting in her mind. The groove was well worn, and she followed the details accurately, step by step. She knew the feel of the big key; she had asked the kind Governor to let her hold it, and then that she might carry it down to the prison, instead of the soldier,—but the Governor said that he could not do this because it was against the law to let anyone have the key unless he were a soldier carrying a big gun. Then the long walk down the street,—and how the soldier walked too slow, and how she knew without being told the direction of the prison. Everything was quite clear until the key grated in the lock, as the key did in the lock of the barn at home,—and the heavy door swung back on its hinges. At this point imagination died in a swoon of bliss.
However, Kanu comforted her with the assurance that the island was close to Cape Town; he was quite sure his informant had told him it could be seen from the city. But she had to surrender the hope of seeing her father immediately after her arrival, and she felt that her former conception of the meeting and its prelude would have to be somewhat modified. She had rehearsed the scene so often that it had become utterly real to her; to alter it now gave her the keenest pain.
Kanu’s woodcraft had stood Elsie in good stead on the journey, but it was all he could do to procure food sufficient to enable the child to bear up against the terrible hardships incidental to such an undertaking. The Heavens had been propitious, in so far that but little rain had fallen, but the cold had been severe in the rugged mountain tracts they were obliged to travel through. Water had been scarce at times and cooking had always been difficult.
For these poor wanderers had to avoid frequented ways, and, even thus, to travel only by night, Kanu knew well enough that if they were seen by any European they would be stopped and sent home. So every morning at daybreak they camped in the most suitable spot to be found in their vicinity. Here, on a bed of soft moss or grass, carefully prepared for her by the tender hands of her savage guide, Elsie would slumber through the day, while Kanu foraged for food, and, after ascending some eminence, surveyed the country with reference to the night’s course of travel.
Kanu’s adventures were sometimes alarming. Once he came face to face with a Boer who was evidently in a bad temper, for he unslung his gun and, without a word of challenge, fired. Kanu only saved himself by dropping behind a rock. Then he fled, incontinently, before his natural enemy had time to reload. More than the Boers he dreaded his own kind. The wild men had been so often treacherously deceived by tamed specimens of their own race who, after gaining their confidence, betrayed them to the Boers, that any stranger with the taint of civilisation upon him was liable to be put to death with horrible tortures.
In his own native desert Kanu would have had no difficulty in finding enough of bulbs, roots, lizards and other local products wherewith to satisfy the needs of his own appetite, but the farther south his steps trended the more unfamiliar the flora and minor fauna became. Even the little of this description of produce he found was of no use to Elsie; for her he had to steal, and it was in doing this that he ran into greatest danger.
His habitual method of plundering was to locate a flock of sheep or goats, crawl around the bases of hills and up and down gullies until he got close to it, and then hang on its skirts until an opportunity offered for seizing and stifling a lamb or a kid.
On the day before reaching the kloof where Elsie had the bitter disappointment of hearing that her father was not at Cape Town after all, but at some island beyond it, Kanu had, after waiting nearly all day for his opportunity, captured a lamb from a flock which was crossing the gully in which he lay waiting. This lamb had loitered behind with its mother,—the shepherd being, at the time, engaged in beating up stragglers in another locality. Kanu carried the prey into a deep, forest-filled hollow. Here he lit a fire of dry wood, which gave off no smoke, and roasted the toothsome carcase whole. Reserving the entrails for his own share, he stripped the roasted flesh from the bones and carried it back to Elsie, who was almost fainting with hunger.
Being now so near their goal and in a country of well-defined roads and many travellers, who did not appear to take much notice of one another, Kanu consented to make a start whilst it was yet daylight, so the strange pair emerged from their concealment and moved slowly down the rugged side of the mountain. When they reached the sandy flat at its foot they set boldly out towards the great mountain whose snowy cowl shone white as a snowdrift under the clear October sky.
They walked on until deep into the night. Elsie, buoyed up by her purpose and almost unconscious of her swollen feet, would still have pressed forward. She declared that she felt no fatigue, but Kanu insisted on her lying down and then she fell into a deep sleep which lasted until dawn.
As the light grew Kanu was astonished to find that the mountain looked nearly as far off as ever. The unfamiliar atmosphere—close to the level of the sea had deceived him. This day turned out to be the most fatiguing of all. The sun smote fiercely upon the red sand and water was scarce and brackish when obtained. However, when the sun sank they were nearly at the foot of the mountain. The soft, steady breeze brought up the thunder of the surf from the Muizenberg beach, and filled the soul of the Bushman with dismay at the unaccustomed sound. He had never been near the sea, so the thrilling diapason of the moving waters was full of terrors.
“Kanu, are you sure that this is the mountain that Cape Town is under? Tell me, what it is like.”
Elsie had dropped in the road from sheer fatigue, and Kanu had borne her to a small copse, only a few yards away.
“The side of the mountain is black with trees but its top is white with a cloud that never moves.”
“Yes,—that is the mountain,” said the child in a tone of relief; “my father told me that it always had a white cloud upon its top.”
Then her head drooped and she fell asleep.
Kanu tightened his belt and mounted guard. In the desert, among the haunts of the fiercest beasts, he would have lain down after a few simple precautions, and felt perfectly safe. Here, near the dwellings of Christians, he felt—and with reason—uneasy. There was a small quantity of meat left, and the smell of it assailed his nostrils, made keen as those of a pointer by famine. How he longed for that meat,—for only one bite. The savage in his breast seized him as it were by the throat every now and then and tried to hurl him at the morsel. But it was Elsie’s, he told himself,—all she had to sustain herself with on the morrow, when there would be still a long walk before her. At length he fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamt of sumptuous banquets for some delightful seconds.
Another tug at the belt. Well, it would soon be morning, and then this great, powerful, beneficent Governor whom Elsie knew of and talked such a lot about, would surely give them something for breakfast.
When day broke the mist had drawn away from the mountain, the huge bulk of which stood out, robed in purple and edged with the gold of the unarisen sun. Elsie slept long and deeply, and woke to a passionate flood of accusing tears when she found that the sun was already high.
As they walked along the well-beaten road they met other sojourners. The savage instinct in Kanu prompted him to hide in the bushes whenever he saw anyone approaching; but, when he found that of the many passers-by none attempted to interfere with them, he merely bent his head and hurried furtively past. No houses were yet in sight, except two square structures high up on the shoulders of the mountain. These were the watch-houses from which, in yet older times, the approach of the Indian Fleet was wont to be signalled to the Castle. The Bushman devoutly hoped that the Governor did not live in either of these, for he knew that Elsie, weak as she was, would never be able to make the ascent.
Anon they reached the shores of Table Bay, and the wide expanse of water filled the Bushman’s soul with deep awe. The scent of the sea stung the flagging blood of the spent child to new vigour; the “whish-whish” of the wavelets and the wild, strange cries of the sea-birds—perhaps they had flown across from the island where her father was waiting for her—spoke to her strained ear in tones of sweetness and mystery, which thrilled through her to the very depths of her being. Her fatigue and her lacerated feet were forgotten; she seemed to tread on air.
At length Kanu gave a sudden exclamation;—the goal of their terrible endeavours was at last in sight. There, shimmering in the soft, opaline haze, lay the lovely city, its white flat-topped houses embowered in trees, whilst the bright green slopes surrounding softened the contrast between its peaceful beauty and the mighty embodied desolation which seemed to prop the sky above it.
Elsie did not speak, but her face lit up and her eyes flashed with almost unearthly gleams. She felt that she was now at length, after all her sore travail, about to meet her father—her father who, innocent, had been torn from her and cast into prison among the vilest of men. Sweetest of all was the thought that she, in her own weak hands, was bearing to him the precious gift of freedom. In imagination she was already passing her hands over his face, as she had been wont to do when she wanted to read his mood, and smoothing out the lines of suffering. The bliss was almost painful in its intensity.
“Kanu,—Oh, Kanu—we are nearly there; are we not?”
“Yes,—but I never thought there were so many houses in the whole world. It would take half an hour on a fresh horse to get to the farthest I can see.”
“Kanu,—I suppose the Governor lives in the biggest house; don’t you think so?”
“Yes,—but there are so many big houses that I do not know where to look for the biggest.”
The Bushman had been on the point of asking more than one of the people whom they had passed, in the street to direct them to the Governor’s house, but he had invariably lost courage at the last moment. In those days there was little traffic in the Cape Town streets except in the late afternoon, when many carriages were to be seen. During the heat of the day all, gentle and simple, retired for the siesta. Thus the wanderers reached the centre of the city without attracting any attention, and without meeting anyone but a few slaves, who were out executing errands.
At length they paused before what Kanu felt sure must be the Governor’s house. It was a large building, several storeys high, and had a lofty, spacious “stoep” surrounded by heavy iron railings, which overlooked the street. The big windows were flanked by bright green shutters which had been thrown back against the wall.
A sound of music issued through the wide, open door,—interspersed, every now and then, with loud bursts of laughter. Yes,—the Governor must certainly live here; he and his friends were, doubtless, holding revel inside. A steep flight of steps led up to one end of the stoep; these Kanu mounted, leading Elsie by the hand.
The Bushman paused before the open doorway and looked in. The splendour appalled him. Rich mats of varied colour covered the floor; wonderful coloured objects hung upon the walls; a large glass case stood upon a table just before him. It was full of clear water, in which numbers of golden fishes darted to and fro,—red light flashing from their scales. Yes, this was surely the house he had been seeking.
As he paused, shrinking back against Elsie who was trying to push him forward, a door suddenly opened on the other side of the room and a man as burly as any Boer Kanu had ever seen emerged, walking unsteadily. He was dressed in blue cloth with bright buttons, and had a funny-looking glazed hat placed sideways on his head. At first he seemed to be unaware that there was anyone but himself in the room. When, however, he became conscious of the presence of Elsie and her companion he started, and paused unsteadily, hiccoughing.
“Sam,” he shouted to someone in the next room, “come and look at this.”
Sam came. He also walked unsteadily. He was nearly as big as his companion and was similarly dressed.
“Well, Sam,—what do you make of it?”
“It gets over me, Cap’n,” said Sam, after a pause of anxious scrutiny.
“Well,—I’ve been round the world and I’ve never seen hair like that—Say, my lass, where do you hail from?”
Kanu replied in Dutch, asking if the Governor lived there, and if he were at home.
“Dry up with that monkey-chatter, or I’ll wring your neck,” rasped the irate Captain. Kanu shrank back in dread, pressing Elsie behind him. The Captain lurched over to the child and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“My lass,—I’ve a little girl at Southampton who looks like you, but you can show her your heels as far as hair goes.—Why—Sam—the child’s blind.”
The Captain had sat down on a chair, drawn Elsie towards him by the shoulders, and looked into her face at close quarters. When his eyes met hers something penetrated to his perceptions through the fumes of the liquor he had drunk and told him she was blind. Sam came forward and had a look. He did not believe the child was blind, and said so. She was just a beggar, shamming. He had often seen the same kind of thing on London Bridge.
The Captain roughly, but kindly, drew the child again towards him. Elsie kept passive and silent in his hands. Perhaps this was one of the Governor’s friends,—or even the Governor himself. She read his character by his touch, and trusted him, but she had shrunk away from Sam.
“Come, my lass,—you look tired and hungry; is it some dinner you want?”
Elsie, feeling that this remark was directly addressed to her, replied in Dutch, using almost the same words as Kanu had used.
“I cannot understand this blooming lingo,” growled the Captain—“Sam,—call the waiter.”
The waiter, a black boy, who spoke both Dutch and English well, came in and interpreted. The Captain was mystified; Sam was sure that the whole thing was a “plant,” and growled an advice to the Captain to keep a careful guard upon his silver watch.
Then the landlady was called. She, good woman, was too busy to be much interested. However, the Captain sent for some food, which he gave to Elsie. She ate a little and passed the rest on to Kanu, who ate it wolfishly. The Captain sent for another plateful, which Kanu disposed of with great rapidity. The Captain—and even Sam—became interested. The Bushman was asked, through the waiter, if he could eat any more. He replied in the affirmative, so another, and after that yet another—plateful was brought. This kind of thing might have gone on indefinitely, had not a young man, who looked like a merchant’s clerk, come and taken possession of the Captain for business purposes.
As he was going away, Elsie arrested him with a cry, and when he turned for a moment she begged pathetically to be told if the house she was in was the Governor’s, and, if not, where his house was. The Captain tossed sixpence to the black waiter and told him to take the “monkey-chap,”—for thus he designated Kanu,—down the street and show him where the Governor berthed.
The waiter, fully persuaded that he had to do with two lunatics, hurried them up one street and down another at the further end of which stood a large white building.
“There,” said he to Kanu, “is where the Governor lives.”
Then he turned round and bolted.