"Oh, another three weeks ought to finish the job," said Saltire. "But, as you know, they are most persistent things. When you think they are done for, you find them sprouting green again below the wound, and have to give them another dose."
"Three weeks!" muttered van Cannan, with moody eyes. He looked to Christine like a man suffering with sickness of the soul. Everyone supposed the rest-cure definitely settled on, but, with the contrariness of an ailing child, he suddenly announced determinedly, "I shall leave for East London this afternoon."
The children were called to kiss him good-bye, and they clustered round him.
"Take care of them for me," he said, with a piercing wistfulness, to
Christine. "Take care of my boy."
Then he turned brusquely to Saxby, making arrangements for a mule-cart to be ready at two o'clock to drive him into Cradock, the nearest large town, where he would have to spend the night before proceeding farther by rail.
Christine could not but be struck by the words he had used, and mused over them wonderingly while she tucked Rita and Coral under their mosquito-curtains. It was her habit to spend this hour with Roddy and a story-book. But today he hovered restlessly, showing no inclination to settle down, and seeming full of some suppressed excitement. At last, he whispered in her ear:
"Don't forget where you said you would come with me—to see Carol and the others." Christine wondered if old Sophy was one of the others, and, even in the noontide heat, she felt a chill.
"All right, Roddy," she agreed slowly. "Wait till I get a sunshade, though. It is dreadfully hot."
She shaded him as much as herself while they threaded their way through the shrubs that seemed to simmer in the grey-brown heat.
Almost every South African farm has its private cemetery. It is the custom to bury the dead where they have lived, and often the graveyard is in the shadiest corner of the garden, where the women sit to sew, the men bring their pipes, and children spread their playthings upon the flat, roughly hewn tombstones.