It was difficult to connect such fragrant, well-tended flowers with the whistling horror out in the darkness. More, it was absurd, impossible. The girl decided that the whole thing was a bad nightmare which she must shake off. The explanation of it could only be that, half asleep, she had dreamed she heard the tapping and the whispers, and smelled the evil odour. Why should a Thing come and tell her to mind the children? "Mind the boy." He was already minded—they were all happy and well cared for in their own home. The boy Roderick must have been dreaming, too, and talking in his sleep. Thus, Christine's clear English mind rejected the whole thing as an illusion, resulting from weariness and the new, strange conditions of her life. Yet there was an Irish side to her that could not so easily dispose of the matter. She remembered with what uneasiness her nights had been haunted from the first. How always, when the dark fell, she had sensed something uncanny, something unseen and menacing, that she could never track to its source. But tonight the sense of hovering evil had taken definite form and direction. It was at the children that harm was directed; the whistling, sighing words had concerned the children only. The girl shivered again at the horrid recollection.
"Yet anything that cares about children cannot be altogether evil," she thought. That comforted her a little, but the spell of horror the night had laid upon her was not lifted until dawn came. Then she slipped on some clothes and let herself out into the morning air.
The garden that straggled about the farm was composed of a dozen century-old oaks, a sprinkling of feathery pepper-trees, and many clumps of brilliant-blossomed cacti. The veranda and outbuildings were heavily hung with creepers, and great barrels of begonias and geraniums stood about. Within a few hundred yards of the house, the green and glowing cultivation stopped as abruptly as the edges of an oasis in the desert, and the Karoo began—that sweeping, high table-land, empty of all but brown stones, long white thorns, fantastically shaped clumps of prickly-pear, bare brown hills, and dried-up rivulets, and that yet is one of the healthiest and, from the farmer's point of view, wealthiest plateaux in the world.
Between the farm and the far hills arose a curious line of shroudy blue, seeming to hover round the estate, mystically encircling it, and cutting it off from the rest of the desert. This was the century-old hedge of blue aloes which gave the farm its name. Planted in a huge ring of many miles' circumference, the great spiked cacti, with leaves thick and flat as hide shields, and pointed as steel spears, made a barrier against cattle, ostriches, and human beings that was impassable except by the appointed gaps. No doubt it had a beauty all its own, but beneath its fantastic, isolated blooms and leaves of Madonna blue, the gnarled roots sheltered a hundred varieties of poisonous reptiles and insects. That is why, in Africa, no one likes blue aloes—they always harbour death.
Dawn on the Karoo more than compensates for its fearsome nights and torrid noontides. The dew, jewelling a thousand spider-webs, the sparkling brightness of the air, the exquisite purity of the atmosphere, and grandeur of space and loneliness rimmed about by rose-tipped skies and far forget-me-not hills make a magic to catch the heart in a net from which it never quite escapes.
Christine felt this enchantment as she wandered across the veld, her eyes fixed on the hills from behind which the sun would presently emerge to fill the land with a clear, pitiless heat that turned everything curiously grey. A dam of water reflecting pink cloud-tips lay bright and still as a sheet of steel. The fields of lucerne, under the morning light, were softly turning from black to emerald, and beyond the aloe hedge a native kraal that was scattered on the side of a hill slowly woke to life. A dog barked; a wisp of smoke curled between the thatched huts, and one or two blanketed figures crept from the low doors. The simple yet secret lives of these people intrigued Christine deeply. She knew little of Kafirs, for she had been in Africa only a few months; but the impassive silence of them behind their watching, alert eyes always fascinated her. They said so little before their masters, the whites. Here, for instance, was a little colony of fifty or more people living in a kraal close to their employers. Some of them were grey-haired and had worked for a quarter of a century on the farm—the men on the land, the women at the house—yet, once their daily tasks were over, none knew what their lives were when they returned to the straggling village of palisades and low-doored huts.
Musing on these things, Christine turned at last and sauntered slowly homeward. Everything was still very quiet, but smoke was rising from the solid farm chimneys, and, rounding the corners of some large outbuildings, she came suddenly upon more life—feathery, fantastic life of spindlelegs and fluttering wings. Scores of baby ostriches, just released from their night shelter, were racing into the morning light, pirouetting round each other like crazy, gleesome sprites. Christine stood laughing at their fandangos and the antics of the Kafirs engaged in herding them. A man standing near, pipe in mouth, and hands in pockets, observing the same scene, was astonished that her sad yet passionate face could so change under the spell of laughter. He had wondered, when he first saw her, why a girl with such ardent eyes should wear such weariness upon her lips and look so disdainfully at life. Now he saw that it was a mask she wore and forgot when she was alone, and he wondered still more what had brought such a girl to be a governess on a Karoo farm.
But in a moment Christine's face changed, resuming, like a veil over its youth and bloom, the look of world-weariness. She bowed slightly to him, with a somewhat cool response to his pleasant morning greeting, and made haste to resume her walk homeward.
She knew him to be Richard Saltire, the government forest and land expert, who was engaged in certain experiments on the farm. He shared a bungalow somewhere on the land with two young Hollanders who were learning ostrich-farming, and came with them to lunch every day at the house. Already, his bold, careless face, with its sunbitten beauty, had separated itself in her memory from the faces of the other men, for it was a face and personality that could not leave a woman undisturbed. Incidentally, it had disturbed her in connection with an impression not altogether agreeable.
One of the first hints Mrs. van Cannan had given the new governess was that the master of Blue Aloes did not care for any kind of intimacy to exist between the womenfolk of the farm and the men occupied about it. Christine had been long enough in South Africa to recognize that this was an odd departure from the general rule of friendliness and equality; but a hint to the proud has the same efficacy as a word to the wise. Besides, she had no longing for the society of men, but rather a wish to forget that she had ever known any. Life had made a hole in her heart which she meant to fill if she could, but only with inanimate things and the love of children. So that Mr. van Cannan's unsociable restriction, far from being irksome, suited her perfectly.