“O Imba, tell your father, the Teacher Tombool, from me that he does not understand us black people, whom he thinks so common, as you understand us, Little Flower, and that he would be wise to go to minister to white ones.”
After this, once more he smiled at Tabitha and then shut his eyes again for the last time, and that was the end of the witch-doctor Menzi.
It may be added that after he had rebuilt the church for the second time, and numbered all the “Menzi-herd” among his congregation, which he did now that “the bull of the herd” was dead, as Menzi had foretold that he would, if Tabitha, whom he had “wrapped with his blanket,” decreed it, Thomas took the sage advice of his departed enemy.
Now, in the after years, he is the much respected if somewhat feared bishop of white settlers in a remote Dominion of the Crown.
Thomas to-day knows more than he used to know, but one thing he has never learned, namely that it was the hand of a maid, yes, the little hidden hand of Tabitha, that drove all “Menzi’s herd” into the gates of the “Heavenly Kraal,” as some of them named his church.
For Tabitha knew when to be silent. Perhaps the Kaffirs, whose minds she could read as an open book, taught her this; or perhaps it was one of the best gifts to her of old Menzi’s “Spirit,” into whose care he passed her with so much formality.
This is the story of the great fight between Thomas Bull the missionary and Menzi the witch-doctor, who was led by his love of a little child whither he never wished to go; not for his own soul’s sake, but just because of that little child.
Menzi did not care about his soul, but, being so strange a man, for some reason that he never explained, for Tabitha, his “Little Flower,” he cared very much indeed. That was why he became a Christian at the last, since in his darkened, spell-bound heart he believed that if he did not, when she too “went down” he would never find her again.
[ONLY A DREAM]
Footprints—footprints—the footprints of one dead. How ghastly they look as they fall before me! Up and down the long hall they go, and I follow them. Pit, pat they fall, those unearthly steps, and beneath them starts up that awful impress. I can see it grow upon the marble, a damp and dreadful thing.