"Jah! Jah!" said old Sara, and hurried away, clucking and muttering, to make the fire and get the morning coffee. Poppy went in and warmed herself, and presently got down the cups and beakers and stood them in a row on the kitchen table. Cups and saucers for aunt and uncle and Clara and Emily, and beakers for the children. Old Sara poured them full of steaming black coffee, added milk and sugar and a home-made rusk in each saucer, and carried them away to the bedrooms. Poppy sat down with a beaker full, dipping a rusk into the coffee and eating it sopped, because the rusks are too hard to eat any other way. Presently old Sara came and squatted on her haunches by the fire too, drinking her coffee from a white basin with a blue band round it (blue that it gave Poppy a pain to look at, it was so cold and livid), and making fearful squelching noises, she sopped and ate. Rolling her big black and white eyes at Poppy, she whispered all that had happened after she had gone. Aunt Lena had screamed and cried for hours, raving that she would not have her child's murderess in the house again. She could go and live in the fowls' hok, or the forage-house, until another home was found for her, but if Poppy came into her sight again, she would tear her limb from limb. Afterwards she had coughed and spat up blood. Old Sara wagged her head, giving this piece of information as one who should say: "Serve her right, too." The doctor had come and said that "something was broken inside." Old Sara patted her wobbly stomach. "She must go to bed and not move for a month or she would go too." Old Sara pointed sanctimoniously upwards.
It was even so. Aunt Lena lay for weeks on her bed, but still ruling her house from it. Poppy was not allowed to eat or sleep under the house roof. A blanket was given to her, and she slept on the bales of chaff in the out-house with a bundle of forage for a pillow. Old Sara brought to her there such meals as she was allowed to receive.
The twins were not allowed to speak to her: a strange girl was hired to take them out—Poppy did not mind that. Clara and Emily passed her in the yard as though she was a jackal or some unclean beast—she minded that even less. The only thing she minded at all, was not being allowed to see Ina before she was buried.
On the day of the funeral, the little cold form in the coffin was not more cold and numb than one lying out in the out-house between two bales of chaff. Despair of mourning had Poppy by the throat. She could have wailed like a banshee. Indeed, if her voice had not gone from her, it is probable that she would have relieved the pressure on her heart and brain in this fashion. As it was, she was the only person in the place who gave no outward sign of mourning. Her old blue galatea overall, with the pattern worn faint in front, and the sleeves in rags, might have grown to her back. But old Sara was given a dark dress of Aunt Lena's, and a new black dook to wear on her head. Clara and Emily had new black alpaca dresses, with tucks round the bottom and black ribbon sashes. Eight little girls came dressed in white, with their hair down and long floating white muslin veils hanging behind, and bunches of white flowers in their hands. They were to carry the coffin in turns, four carrying and four walking behind, because it was a very long way to the graveyard. Mr. Kennedy and Georgie and Bobby walked behind them, and then a great many men. But the saddest mourner of all watched from the crack of the forage-house door, and thought how sad and beautiful it all was, and how it would have been spoilt if she had gone out and joined it in her blue overall; and after the procession was out of sight, lay there on her face on the chaff, and could not cry; and seemed to have swallowed a stone, that stuck in her throat and gave her dreadful pains all across her chest; and whose heart kept saying: "I hate God! I hate aunt!" And when she tried to scream it aloud, found that she had no voice.
In the evening when the sun was set, but before it was dark, a figure stole out of the back yard, crept through the empty spruit, slipped through a private garden and came out by the cathedral steps; then up past the big church bell that tolled for the dead, and so to the graveyard.
All the way she gathered wild flowers and grasses—rock-maiden-hair, rooi gras, moon-flowers, and most especially shivery-grass, and the little perky rushes with a flower sprouting out of them, which the children call tulps. Ina had always loved these. Some "four o'clocks" too, stolen from a front garden as she passed, were added, and even a stink bloem graced the great bunch with which Poppy entered the churchyard.
She found a new little heap of red earth that she knew must be Ina's grave, for it was all covered with wreaths and the bunches of flowers the eight girls had carried. Scraping them all to the foot of the grave, Poppy laid hers where she thought Ina's hands would be, whispering down through the earth:
"From Poppy, Ina—Poppy who loves you best of all."
Some nights old Sara would come sneaking softly over to the forage-house, to sit a while with Poppy; sometimes she had a rusk to give the prisoner; most often she had nothing but an end of candle, but that was very welcome. Lighting it, and sticking it on a side beam, she would squat on the floor, and taking off her dook, proceed to comb her wool. Poppy was glad of company, and interested in the frank way old Sara attended to the business of catching and killing her chochermanners; besides, there were a lot of interesting things in old Sara's wool besides chochermanners: there was a little bone box full of snuff, and a little bone spoon to put it in the nose with; and a piece of paper with all old Sara's money in it; and a tooth belonging to old Sara's mother, and several small home-made bone combs and pins and charms.