Chapter Fifteen.
“Whoso Breaketh a Fence...”
The night had just fallen when Koos Bester arrived at his camp after leaving Nathan, his persecutor, to his dreadful fate in the burning dunes. Koos arrived in the wildest state of excitement and the highest of spirits. His team was in a miserable condition; the poor horses just staggered away for a few yards when outspanned and then sank exhausted on the ground. The Hottentot servants attempted to make them get up and walk slowly about so as to cool gradually before drinking. With some difficulty the leaders were got upon their legs. The wheelers, however, could not be induced by either blows or persuasion to arise; about an hour afterwards it was found that they were dead.
Mrs Bester was very uneasy; she felt that something was wrong. Koos drank quantities of water but could not be induced to eat. After a while he flung himself upon the bed and fell at once into a deep sleep which lasted until noon of the following day. Then he became violently ill. At his wife’s earnest solicitation he had eaten a little food upon awakening, but this he was unable to keep upon his stomach. Then he lay on the bed for a couple of days, during which he hardly spoke.
All the other Boers had trekked away to the Nachtmaal at Namies, so, with the exception of her old and feeble father and the Hottentot servants, Mrs Bester had no one to turn to for assistance or advice.
One night Koos began muttering to himself; from this time he seemed to be quite bereft of his understanding. He sometimes ate food that was placed before him with avidity. Six days and nights passed in this manner. He appeared to suffer acute pain in his head and to be continually thirsty. At length he again slept deeply. Mrs Bester had taken the children out of the mat-house and was staying with them in the wagon for the purpose of keeping them quiet. In the middle of the night she stole quietly out and went on tiptoe to the mat-house door. She listened carefully, but there was no sound of breathing. Then she softly struck a match and looked in under the door-flap. The bed was empty. She called up the servants and a search was made, but no trace of her husband could be found.
Koos Bester awoke just before midnight and sat up in bed. He could not remember where he was or what had happened. He got up and groped about; then he realised that he was at home, in his own mat-house. Then the past came back to him, bit by bit, and the wretched man realised that he had stained his soul with a double murder. He would be hanged, that was now certain; he would give himself up and get the thing over as soon as possible. To get it over quickly was all he was very anxious about.
But where were his wife and children? Some faint flickering memories of what had occurred during his delirium came back to him, and he arrived at a true inference regarding their absence. He was glad. It was terrible to be alone, but the dread of meeting his wife and telling her—as he felt he inevitably must when next he saw her—of what he had done, kept him from calling her. He felt quite sure that she and the children were in the wagon, close at hand.
The darkness was full of terrible and menacing shapes; huddled figures crouched all over the floor. The far, faint yowl of a jackal sounded from the direction of the dunes; it reminded him of Nathan’s hoarse, despairing scream when he realised that he was abandoned to die of thirst. The mat-house, with its population of mysterious shadows and huddled shapes, became intolerable. Better the sense of freedom outside under the accusing stars, where a man can get away from the thing that seems to crawl to his feet as though to clasp his knees. He lifted the door-flap and stepped out into the night.
The Hottentot servants had inhabited a scherm about fifty yards to the rear of the camp. Hottentots often sit up more than half the night, chatting, laughing, and dancing. Mrs Bester, for the sake of keeping the neighbourhood quiet, had told the servants to move their scherm farther away. They had, accordingly, taken their belongings to the other side of a little knoll about two hundred yards away, on the right-hand side of the camp. Here they might hold their nocturnal jollifications to their hearts’ content without disturbing anybody or anything except the meerkats in the adjacent burrows.
A wandering stranger from Great Namaqualand had arrived during the course of the evening. This man had a ramkee upon which he performed with skill. A few months previously he had visited Namies, and had one night listened to Gert Gemsbok playing his favourite tune. Being struck with admiration of the melody, he had picked it up. He was now popularising it among the dwellers of the Desert, for he played it at every scherm he visited.
Coffee had been made of burnt rye, a sheep had died on the previous day; thus the scherm contained the materials for a feast. The company had been dancing to a series of inspiriting reels, but were now resting a space from their laborious leapings and gruntings. The stranger was playing Gert Gemsbok’s tune as an interlude to the reels. A bright fire of candle-bushes was burning. All but the ramkee player were lying down resting behind the scherm fence.
When Koos Bester stepped out of the mat-house he at once experienced a sense of relief. His head was bare and the cool breeze which wandered over the Desert refreshed his brain. The stars could, he found, pity as well as accuse; the night seemed to take compassion on his misery. He looked round to the back of the camp in the direction of where the scherm of the servants had been, and was relieved to see no light. He wanted to be free—even of the suggestion of the presence of another human being—until he had rearranged his distorted faculties. The sandy road led past the camp; he turned to the right and paced slowly along it, with bent head.
He stopped short, for a sound of horribly familiar music reached his ear; then he started and gasped, for the glow of a fire smote his eyes, coming from behind the little knoll. Being to windward of the knoll, he could not exactly distinguish what tune was being played. He knew that the instrument was a ramkee—that, in itself, was sufficiently horrible. A cold hand seemed to steal into his breast and gradually close upon his stricken heart. He stood rigidly still and tried to catch the tune exactly. He strained every nerve with this end, but the breeze freshened slightly, and only an indefinite tinkle reached him. In the midst of his reeling consciousness only one idea stood firm—he must go closer and determine who the player was and what the tune that was being played. He pressed his hands convulsively to his ears and stepped, crouching, towards the knoll.
He reached the knoll and cautiously raised his head till he was able to see over its top. The musician was sitting with his back towards the watcher, and just inside the scherm. Against the diffused glow of the embers—for the flame had died down—the outline of his head and shoulders stood clear and black. To the mind of Koos came the certain conviction that he was looking at the ghost of the man he had murdered. With a supreme effort of despairing will he tore his shielding hands away from his ears, and the unmistakable tones of the dead man’s music crashed like thunder into his brain.
Then Koos Bester’s madness returned upon him, and he fled away noiselessly across the Desert sands in the direction of the dunes.
It was long before he paused, for the fever in his brain prevented him from feeling fatigue. At length, as he was running over the roofs of a city of Desert mice, the ground gave way beneath his foot and he fell. The shock rendered him almost senseless. After a few minutes he sat up, pressed his hands to his temples, and began to grope in the haunted spaces of his darkened intellect for some clue to guide him.
He looked around. The dew-washed air of the Desert night was clear as crystal, the pulsing stars were domed over him sumptuously. He dug his hot hands into the cooling sand and lifted his faced to meet the soft, refreshing breeze.
The Hottentots at the scherm had evidently thrown another armful of candle-bush upon the embers, for a bright flame shot up and momentarily increased in volume. Koos gazed at it, fascinated. As the fire grew brighter he thought it was rushing toward him with terrific speed. The flames had been sent from hell to consume him quick. Like Abiram, God had doomed him for his crimes to go down alive into the pit. He sprang to his feet with a terrible cry, and again fled onwards in the direction of the dunes.
When he again paused he was wading in the heavy sand on the flank of the main dune. He had ascended slightly and thus could overlook a large area of the Desert. The cold breath which circles around the world as the precursor of the dawn was stealing over the plains. The rain had fallen recently upon this side of the Desert, and many of the Boers had sent their stock, in charge of herds, to graze on the track of the shower. The scantily clad Hottentots awoke to the chill, so they began to light fires. Here and there, at immense distances apart, he could see the sudden leapings of the flames from the easily kindled candle-bushes. To the demented brain of the fugitive it appeared as if the whole Desert were full of fiends seeking him with torches, far and near. Where the Milky Way dipped to the horizon the thronging stars seemed each a torch lit at the nether flame, and borne by a searching demon. In among the sinuous dunes he might escape. If he could but reach Inkruip he might creep down the water-shaft and hide. They would never think of looking for him there. In the icy water he might cool his scorched brain.
He stumbled on, crossing dune after dune and ploughing through the sand as with the strength of a giant. In one of the hollows he came to a clump of low bush. Into this he crept for hiding. He lay prone, completely covered, and looking out through a narrow opening. The morning star tipped the back of the dune he had last crossed and thrilled through the clear atmosphere with almost super-stellar brilliance. Koos took this for the torch of a tracking fiend, and again rushed forward with a scream of agonised dismay. His only possible refuge now was under the ground at Inkruip.
The sun arose and scorched his bare head. He was now almost unconscious; he simply pressed forward in obedience to a blind, animal instinct—a sort of momentum generated by the terror which had passed away with the darkness.
It was an awful day, not a breath of wind could be felt, but the sun smote down from a pitiless heaven in all the fulness of its torrid might. Koos pressed blindly up the side of a steep, high dune—his breath coming in husky, choking gasps. Then something seemed to explode in his head with the sound like that of a cannon, and he fell upon his face in the sand.
He had one blinding flash of consciousness, during the continuance of which he seemed again to live through all his lifetime and see anew everything he had ever seen. The minutest trifles of former experience became distinctly apparent, as the smallest details of a landscape show up when lightning flashes near and vividly on a dark night. Then came the darkness which men call death.
As soon as ever day broke the spoor of the missing man was found and followed. Mrs Bester, assisted by her old father, inspanned four horses in the cart and drove on behind the trackers. When she reached the dunes she found that the horses could take the cart no farther, so she outspanned the team and tied the legs of each animal together to prevent it from straying.
She sat through weary hours in the broiling heat. Early in the afternoon one of the Hottentots returned with word that her husband’s dead body had been found. The horses were at once inspanned, and the cart taken by a roundabout course to the vicinity of where it was lying. It was late at night when she arrived at the camp, with the corpse of her husband tied, stiff and stark, on the seat beside her.
Next day two constables came with a warrant for Koos Bester’s arrest, but he had gone before a higher tribunal than that of the Special Magistrate.