“You think so now, dear,” he said, “but time will show. Supposing that I were not——” and he stopped, nor would he complete the sentence. Indeed those words of his tormented me day and night for weeks, for I finished them in a hundred ways, each more fatal than the last.
Well, I returned to the farm, and immediately afterwards my great-grandmother took the fancy of dictating her history, the ending of which seemed to affect her much, for when it was done she told me sharply to put the typed sheets away and let her hear or see no more of them. Then she rose with difficulty, for the dropsy in her limbs made her inactive, and walked with the help of a stick to the stoep, where she sat down, looking across the plain at the solemn range of the Drakensberg and thinking without doubt, of that night of fear when my grandfather had rushed down its steeps upon the great schimmel to save her daughter and his wife from an awful death.
The stead where we lived in Natal was built under the lea of a projecting spur of the white-topped koppie, and over that spur runs a footpath leading to the township. Suddenly the old lady looked up and, not twenty yards away from her, saw standing on the ridge of it, as though in doubt which way to turn, a gentleman dressed in the kilted uniform of an officer of a Highland regiment the like of which she had never seen before.
“Dear Lord!” I heard her exclaim, “here is a white man wearing the moocha of a Kaffir. Suzanne! Suzanne! come and send away this half-clad fellow.”
Putting down my papers I ran from the room and at a single glance saw that “the half-clad fellow” was none other than Ralph himself. In my delight I lost my head, and forgetting everything except that my betrothed was there before me, I sprang from the stoep and, flying up the little slope, I fell into his open arms. For a few seconds there was silence, then from behind me rose a dreadful shriek followed by cries for help. Freeing myself from Ralph’s embrace, I looked round to see my great-grandmother hobbling towards us with uplifted stick. Ralph put his eye-glass in his eye and looked at her.
“Who is this old lady, Suzanne?” he asked.
Before I could answer there came from her lips such a torrent of indignation as I had never heard before.
“What is she saying?” asked Ralph again, who could not understand one word of Dutch. “She seems put out.”
“It is my great-grandmother, the Vrouw Botmar,” I faltered, “and she does not understand—I have never told her.”
“Ah! I see. Well, perhaps it would be as well to explain,” he answered, which I accordingly began to do as best I could, feeling more foolish than ever I did before. As I stammered out my excuses I saw her face change, and guessed that she was no longer listening to me.