Chapter Six.
Gideon and Marta.
Night had almost fallen when Gideon reached his homestead on the seventh day after the trial. He had been, throughout the whole journey, a prey to the keenest misery. In the short and broken sleep which visited his distracted brain the image of Stephanus as he had last seen him, haunted his dreams. The dauntless mien and the noble courage with which his brother had met his doom; the puzzled, pathetic expression upon the face of the blind child; the belated revelation of love combined with a terrifying appeal for forgiveness which he had read in the face of the woman for whom his passion had never died, swept over the field of his consciousness like clouds across a storm-swept sky. He felt no remorse for what he had done; on the contrary, his inability to enjoy the revenge he had long panted for, was the cause of redoubled resentment against his enemy.
After greeting his family with forced cheerfulness, Gideon drank a cup of coffee and at once retired to bed, saying that he felt fatigued after his long journey. His wife, Aletta, was not deceived by his demeanour, but there was that in his face which caused her to forbear asking any questions.
Next morning Gideon tried to avoid everybody, and it was not until midday that Aletta contrived to satisfy her painful suspense in regard to the result of the trial. He was then standing at the back of the wagon-house with bent head and an air of painful preoccupation. He did not hear her approaching footsteps. When she laid a hesitating hand upon his arm he started as though he had been struck, and looked at her with troubled eyes.
“Gideon,” she said in a low and hurried tone—“tell me about Stephanus.”
“The wolf is in a trap,” he said with a savage laugh—“for ten long years he will have to bite the door before it opens.”
“Ten years”—repeated Aletta in an awed whisper—“poor Stephanus; I did not think it would have gone so hard with him.”
“Aletta,” he broke out wrathfully, “are you taking the part of this wolf—this jackal in a man’s skin, against me?”
“No—no—Gideon,—I do not take his part;—but ten years is such a long time.—And I was thinking of Marta and the children; they will never see him again.”
“And a good thing too. The murdering wild beast should have been hanged.”
In reality the wives of the brothers had, all through the weary course of the feud, been inclined to take the parts of their respective brothers-in-law against their husbands. Each, brought into daily contact with the black rancour displayed by her husband, had thought that the feeling could not possibly be so bad on the other side.
Weary as had been the days to Aletta and Adrian, those which followed were wearier still. A black cloud seemed to brood over the household. No one ever smiled. Each avoided the eyes of the others as though fearful of what the eyes might read or reveal. At each cheerless meal the silent, invisible presence of Stephanus seemed to take its seat; in the brightest sunlight its shadow seemed to darken the house.
More than once Aletta had been on the point of suggesting that advances might be made to Marta in her loneliness, but Gideon had lately got into the habit of bursting into such fury on the slightest provocation, that Aletta was afraid of irritating him and held her peace.
Gideon, also, had more than once thought of going to visit his sister-in-law, but the dread of again meeting what he had read in her eyes on the day of the trial held him back. It was currently known that Marta was in bad health and that Uncle Diederick had been called in to prescribe for her more than once.
Thus the weary days dragged on through three weary years, but the stricken household kept no count of time. In material things Gideon prospered. Each season the years came with unusual regularity, and his flocks and herds increased until he became rich among his fellows.
One day two figures were seen approaching from the direction of Stephanus’ homestead. They turned out to be those of the blind girl, Elsie, and a very diminutive Bushman lad named Kanu, who had grown up on the farm. Kanu had been captured as a child, years before, in the course of an exterminating raid upon some Bushman depredators at their stronghold in an almost inaccessible part of the Roggeveld Mountains.
Kanu was about sixteen years of age. From her early childhood he had devoted himself to the service of the blind girl; at last his devotion had grown to positive worship. In Kanu’s company Elsie would wander far and wide, over mountain and plain, in perfect safety.
The Bushman had picked up a smattering of Dutch, but still spoke his own tongue fluently, for there were a number of semi-domesticated Bushman servants on the farm—captives from different raids. Such raids were, no doubt, sometimes rendered necessary by the plundering propensities of the pygmy sons of Ishmael, but there was another side of the question:—where Bushmen were plentiful the Boers did not, as a rule, find it necessary to purchase slaves.
The blind child was led by her guide to the front door of the house, which stood open. The day was hot and the family were sitting at table, trying to hurry through their dismal midday meal. Elsie crossed the threshold without knocking and stood at her Uncle’s side. Her hair hung below her waist in a rich, yellow mass, and her eyes gleamed as they always did under the influence of excitement, and in appropriate light. The three sitting at the table sat and gazed at her in silent and startled surprise.
“Uncle Gideon,” she said in a clear, piercing voice.
“Well,” said Gideon in a voice of forced roughness, “what do you want?”
“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 space 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 passage.
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 space 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 courtship and his own bitter disappointment came back to him with strange distinctness. How had the misunderstanding arisen; who was to blame?—“Stephanus 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 hoarse, broken murmur he said:
“Stephanus 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 passed 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 attitude. There Stephanus 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 Stephanus, 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 Stephanus had uttered and his own insulting reply. Again he felt the sickening torture of the crashing 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 Stephanus 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. Stephanus, 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 Stephanus 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 Stephanus’ farm and manage it for the benefit of the two children, until Stephanus’ 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.