“Ah!” She sighed her deep sigh. “She will grow up perhaps—and in her turn watch the road.”
Chapter Five.
The Mollmeit of the Mountain.
(Dutch for mad woman or witch.)
When the number of coloured pupils attending the Friend for Little Children School reached one hundred and fifty, it was decided that Sister Joanna ought to have the assistance of a white pupil-teacher as well as the three half-caste young girls she had already trained. The several High-Dutch ladies of Brandersberg who interested themselves in Sister Joanna’s good work, both by collecting subscriptions for it abroad and helping to place the young girls in domestic service after they had left school, determined to advertise in the Free State newspapers for a girl who would not only teach in the school, but also live with Sister Joanna at the school cottage, and help with the simple domestic arrangements. For Sister Joanna kept no servant; she would have considered it extravagant to do so while she had health and strength; besides, she had lived so long in the Colony that there was nothing in the way of domestic and everyday housework she was not able for. She was a good cook, could make her own soap, smoke her own legs of mutton, and grow her own vegetables. She had a neat little garden round the cottage (which stood some hundred and fifty yards from the school), and a corner of it was devoted to herbs, for she was deeply learned in the science of herbal healing, and could cure a headache, a varicose vein, a black eye, or supply you with a sleeping draught that would make you forget you had ever known neuralgia; all out of one little corner of her garden. Besides this, she managed with great skill and discipline the large school of coloured boys and girls which she had started herself with half a dozen children, some fifteen or sixteen years before; and yet found time to tend the sick, harass the lazy, and manage the affairs generally of everyone in the native Location. However, though she would not admit it, she was beginning to look old and worn, and it was certainly a good idea to get someone to help her in her busy life.
The advertisement brought several answers, but none of them so satisfactory as that of a young Bloemhof girl called Mary Russel. Mary it seemed had not only received a good education and passed her “Matric” (a rather unusual thing in a girl of seventeen), but being the eldest of a large and not at all wealthy family was also extremely domesticated. The Brandersberg ladies thought well of her letter of application, and better still of Mary herself when she arrived, pretty and fresh and kind, with a firm mouth and a courageous glance in her grey eyes. Though of English extraction she was colonial born, a further qualification for the place, for Colonials though kind and just do not spoil natives by making too much of them as English people are apt to do. No sooner was Mary Russel installed than she became a great favourite with the children, and the Brandersberg ladies feeling that they had done well by so popular a character as Sister Joanna thereafter turned their attention to their own affairs. The large and flourishing town of Brandersberg lay within the shadow of a mighty berg that in any other country would be called a mountain, and that even in Africa was considered worthy of a title. Thaba Inkosisan it was called, and when the sun set, its great jagged shadow was flung far across the veld, just missing Brandersberg, but falling full and black upon the native Location; and this was considered a curious and sinister thing by the coloured population, for it was upon their village and in their hearts that the mountain had cast sorrow and fear.
The Friend for Little Children School was close at the foot of the berg, and a road ran direct from it to the Location, so that the children could go to and fro between their homes and the school without approaching the Dutch town; and perhaps this was one of the reasons why Sister Joanna’s work was as popular with the whites as with the natives, for in the Free State the whites did not care for their children to mix with the natives, and any arrangement to keep the two races apart was greatly favoured. But the situation of the school was a cause of inquietude amongst the coloured parents; not because it was too far from the town, but because it was too near the berg. For Thaba Inkosisan was haunted by a mollmeit, and a mollmeit is no friend to little children.
The haunting of the mountain dated from many years back. When Mary Russel heard the story, she knew that the horrible tragedy in which it originated must have occurred about the time she was born, for it was in that year that the Basutoes fought in the Free State, surrounding and putting many a town into a state of siege. Brandersberg had been among the beleaguered towns, and the inhabitants of several farms near by had been put to the assegai by the fierce Basuto warriors.