After the meal the Boer lit his pipe, sat down on a piece of rock, and smoked and looked on till midday, by which time the fruit-trees were all planted, and the big Kaffir had trotted to and fro with a couple of buckets, bringing water to fill up the saucer-like depressions placed about each tree. Then Aunt Jenny called us to dinner, and after that the Boer said it was time to inspan and begin the journey back.
Oh, how well I remember it all!—seeing my father opening a wash-leather bag and paying the Boer the sum that had been agreed upon, and that he wasn’t satisfied, but asked for another dollar for the work done by his man. Then father laughed and said he ought to charge for the meals that had been eaten; but he gave the Boer the money all the same; and Aunt Jenny uttered a deep grunt, and said afterwards in her old-fashioned way, “Oh John, what a foolish boy you are!” Then he kissed her and said, “Yes, Jen. I always was. You didn’t half-teach me when I was young.”
This was after we had watched the wagon grow smaller and smaller in the distance on its way back, and after the great black had stood and looked down at me and laughed in his big, noisy way.
Then once more we were alone in the great desert, father looking proudly down at his little orchard, and Bob walking up and down touching every tree, and counting them over again.
“Begins to look homely now, Val,” he said; “but we must work, boy—work.”
We did work hard to make that place the home it grew to.
“It’s for you, boys,” he said, “when I’m dead and gone;” and it was about that time I began to think and understand more fully how father was doing it all for the sake of us boys, and to try and ease his heart-ache. Aunt Jenny set me thinking by her words, and at last I fully grasped how it all was.
“I believe he’d have died broken-hearted, Val,” she said to me, “if I hadn’t come to him. It was after your poor dear mother passed away. I told him he was not acting like a man and a father to give up like that, and it roused him; and one day—you remember, it was when I had come to keep house for him—he turned to me and said, ‘I shall never be happy in England again; and I’ve been thinking it would be a good thing to take those boys out to the Cape and settle there. They’ll grow up well and strong in the new land, and I shall try to make a home for them yonder.’ ‘Yes, John,’ I said, ‘that’s the very thing you ought to do.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but it means leaving you behind, Jenny, dear, and you’ll perhaps never set eyes upon them again.’ ‘Oh, yes, I shall, John,’ I said, ‘for I’ve come to stay.’ ‘What!’ he cried; ‘would you go with us, sis?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘to the very end of the world.’ So we came here, Val, where there’s plenty of room, and no neighbours to find fault with our ways.”
That’s how it was; and now I can admire and think of how Aunt Jenny, the prim maiden lady, gave up all her own old ways to set to and work and drudge for us all, living in a wagon and then in a tent, and smiling pleasantly at the trees we planted, and bringing us lunch where we were working away, dragging down stones for the house which progressed so slowly, though father’s ideas wore modest.
“For,” said he, “we’ll build one big stone room, Val, and make it into two with part of the tent. Then by-and-by we’ll build another room against it, and then another and another till we get it into a house.”