She folded her hands on her lap and turned aside her face and looked away with reminiscent gaze over the sunlit landscape. Possibly she saw anew those long dead years passing before her mind like the mirage trees of the veld which appear only to vanish again. Matheson watched her curiously, anticipating something of her story. How many persons in that country, he wondered, had been hurt by the conflicting interests of the two white races?
“And then,” she added quietly, “all the happiness came to an end... everything came to an end with the war—with those three bitter years of struggle and hatred. The British were wrong—very wrong. I believe if I had not been married to a Dutchman I should have felt that. It is a black mark against our national honour.”
He noticed with faint surprise that in her condemnation of her country she associated herself with it for the first time—it might have been unconsciously, or it might have been that, in condemning it, some instinct of race caused her to identify herself with its disgrace. There was a suggestion of a desire to defend in that simple connection, to defend what she could not condone.
“You don’t know,” she said—“no one could know who was not directly concerned—all the injustice of the war... I lost my husband, I lost my son—not fighting; it wouldn’t have been so hard had they died fighting for their independence. They were both prisoners, in an internment camp near Matjesfontein. And they died there. My boy was delicate. I don’t know... I suppose things were rough and he needed care. He developed consumption, and died and was buried there. I was not allowed to see him. I have never seen his grave.”
Her voice was slightly tremulous, but she betrayed no other sign of emotion, and resumed quietly with only a brief pause:
“His father died later. I think myself his heart was broken.” She lifted protesting eyes. “Is it worth it? ... these broken hearts and broken lives—the price of territorial gain! It is too much to pay for any country’s aggrandisement. And the bitterness to me lay in the knowledge that it was my own country inflicting this injustice on a weaker people. I cannot convey all I suffered. I was treated with great indignity—a prisoner in my own house, where I remained with my three youngest children. I wasn’t allowed outside the house save by permit, and it was with difficulty I obtained that. I insisted on seeing the officer in charge, and informed him I was an Englishwoman. He was very rough with me, and told me to be careful or I might find myself interned also.
“Oh! I cannot describe the misery and the hopelessness of that time. I don’t know how I lived through it; but one learns to endure. Now you know why I am bitter, why my children are bitter, against the English. They have nothing to teach them love of reverence for England—the nation that made them orphans, and treated their mother harshly. These wrongs live in the memory—they embitter life.”
“Yes,” he said, and was silent. It was so difficult to say anything in face of what he had heard. It was because he saw her point of view so clearly, sympathised with her in her sorrow, that he found it impossible to attempt to point out that she was taking an altogether wrong view. Her judgment was biassed. In no question concerning the community is the individual point of view the one to be considered. But one can’t say these things to a woman who has suffered deeply.
Suddenly he put out a hand and laid it upon hers. There was something in his action, in the firm reassuring grip of his fingers, that moved her more than he knew. It was as the outstretched hand of a fellow-countryman gripping hers in the wilderness; it conveyed hope and comfort.
“I say, I’m awfully sorry,” he said. He pressed her hand firmly and then released it and sat looking away from her, considering a while.