Swallow: A Tale of the Great Trek

by H. Rider Haggard

So he went, and did not return again till late, and we three sat together and made pretense to be very happy, but somehow were a little sad, for Jan’s words about sin and sorrow stuck in our hearts, as the honest words of a stupid, upright man are apt to do.

Now on the morrow at dawn, as had been arranged, Jan and Ralph rode away to the warm veldt with the cattle, leaving me and Suzanne to look after the farm. Three days later the Scotchmen came, and then it was that for love of Ralph and for the sake of the happiness of my daughter I sinned the greatest sin of all my life—the sin that was destined to shape the fates of others yet unborn.

I was seated on the stoep in the afternoon when I saw three white men and some Cape boys, their servants, riding up to the house.

“Here come those who would steal my boy from me,” I thought to myself, and, like Pharaoh, I hardened my heart.

Now in those days my sight was very good, and while the men were yet some way off I studied them all and made up my mind about them. First there was a large young man of five-and-twenty or thereabouts, and I noted with a sort of fear that he was not unlike to Ralph. The eyes were the same and the shape of the forehead, only this gentleman had a weak, uncertain mouth, and I judged that he was very good-humoured, but of an indolent mind. By his side rode another man of quite a different stamp, and middle-aged. “The lawyer,” I said to myself as I looked at his weasel-like face, bushy eyebrows, and red hair. Indeed, that was an easy guess, for who can mistake a lawyer, whatever his race may be? That trade is stronger than any blood, and leaves the same seal on all who follow it. Doubtless if those lawyers of whom the Lord speaks hard things in the Testament were set side by side with the lawyers who draw mortgage bonds and practise usury here in South Africa, they would prove to be as like to each other as are the grains of corn upon one mealie cob. Yes, when, all dressed the same, they stand together among the goats on the last day few indeed will know them apart.

“A fool and a knave,” said I to myself. “Well, perhaps I can deal with the knave and then the fool will not trouble me.”

As for the third man, I took no pains to study him, for I saw at once that he was nothing but an interpreter.

Well, up they rode to the stoep, the two Englishmen taking off their hats to me, after their foolish fashion, while the interpreter, who called me “Aunt,” although I was younger than he was, asked for leave to off-saddle, according to our custom. I nodded my head, and having given the horses to the Cape boys, they came up onto the stoep and shook hands with me as I sat. I was not going to rise to greet two Englishmen whom I already hated in my heart, first because they were Englishmen, and secondly because they were about to tempt me into sin, for such sooner or later we always learn to hate.

“Sit,” I said, pointing to the yellow-wood bench which was seated with strips of rimpi, and the three of them squeezed themselves into the bench and sat there like white-breasted crows on a bough; the young man staring at me with a silly smile, the lawyer peering this way and that, and turning up his sharp nose at the place and all in it, and the interpreter doing nothing at all, for he was a sensible man, who knew the habits of well-bred people and how to behave in their presence. After five minutes or so the lawyer grew impatient, and said something in a sharp voice, to which the interpreter answered, “Wait.”

So they waited till, just as the young man was beginning to go to sleep before my very eyes, Suzanne came onto the verandah, whereupon he woke up in a hurry, and, jumping off the bench, began to bow and scrape and to offer her his seat, for there was no other.