“We don’t hate. As a race we are healthy: grievances do not fester with us; they heal.”
“I know,” she said. “You pride yourselves on that. You don’t bear malice. But in your generosity you incline to overlook the fact that this patronising attitude insults the object of your benevolence. You say tolerantly: ‘The Boer is not half bad; he’s useful; and anyway there is no getting rid of him. He is here for always. We will let bygones be bygones and not bear ill will,’—forgetting that the cause for ill will is on his side rather than on yours, and showing surprise that he does not respond, and appear obliged to you. You should learn to remember—to forget too easily causes suffering to others.”
“Honor!” Mrs Krige interposed again.
Honor passed swiftly behind Matheson’s chair and approached her mother.
“I think at least you should bear in mind,” Matheson said quietly, “that your mother is an Englishwoman.”
“My mother is Dutch,” Honor replied quickly, and put an arm about her mother’s shoulders and drew close to her.
Something in that protective gesture, in the tones of the proud determined young voice, and in the older woman’s acquiescent silence, acted like a silencing hand laid on Matheson’s lips. He felt tragedy in the air. She had said that she was revealing the bleeding heart of Africa to him—she was doing more; he was gazing on the stark, unlovely body of the past, disinterred from its too shallow grave by the morbid passions which are born of hate.
And yet he could not understand. How came this daughter of an Englishwoman to feel thus bitterly towards her mother’s people?—and why did the mother acquiesce in the condemnation of her country? It was as perplexing as it was distressing. Across the turmoil of his thoughts, a thing irrelevant and yet not without its significance in relation to the present disturbing scene, a speech the Jew had made at lunch that day flashed with startling clearness; and he recalled, besides the words, the distaste in the speaker’s tones when replying about Benauwdheidfontein: “It suggests being at odds with life... fear lurks in the word. It’s a name with a sinister meaning—an unlucky name.”
Possibly the Kriges were at odds with life. Could it be that Honor, beautiful, young, intelligent, was at odds with the life which for her was only beginning? It could not be. The sorrows that embitter are encountered usually farther along the road: they are not the skies of spring and summer which are overcast.
His gaze, lingering upon her figure, as she stood in the dusk with her arm about her mother’s shoulders, lifted to her face which in the fading light showed little more than an outline. It was, he decided, some fanciful touch of the twilight that gave to her features the expression of earnest entreaty he imagined he saw in them; her eyes shone with a softness in such direct contradiction to the hostility of her words, the proud aloofness of her manner, that he knew it for a trick of the twilight. No woman who felt so bitterly against his country could turn so soft a gaze upon an Englishman.