“Surely Mopo or Umbopa,” she replied, “you dreamed three dreams, not one. Is it of the last you speak?—that dream at the kraal Duguza, when the Inkosazana rode past you on a storm clothed in lightning, and shaking in her hand a spear of fire?”
“Yes, I speak of it,” he replied in an awed voice, “but if thou art but a woman as thou hast said, how knowest thou these things?”
“Perchance I am both woman and spirit, and perchance the past tells them to me,” Rachel answered; “but the past has many voices, and now that I dwell in the flesh I cannot hear them all. Let me search you out. Let me read your heart,” and she bent forward and fixed her eyes upon him, holding him with her eyes.
“Ah! now I see and I hear,” she said presently. “Had you not a sister, Mopo, a certain Baleka, who afterwards entered the house of the Black One and bore a son and died in the Tatiyana Cleft? Shall I tell you how she died?”
“Tell it not! Tell it not!” exclaimed the old man quaveringly.
“So be it. There is no need. Yet ere she died you made a promise to this Baleka, and that promise you kept at the kraal Duguza, you and the prince Umhlangana, and another prince whose name I forget,” and she looked at Dingaan, who put his hand before his face. “You kept that promise with an assegai—let me look, let me look into your heart—yes, with a little assegai handled with the royal red wood, an assegai that had drunk much blood.”
Now a low moan broke from the lips of Dingaan, and those who sat with them, while Umbopa shivered as though with cold.
“Have mercy, I pray thee,” he gasped. “Forgive me if at times since we met at Ramah I thought thee but a white maiden, beautiful and bold, as thou didst declare thyself to be. Now I see thou hast the spirit, or else how didst thou know these things?”
Noie heard and smiled in the shadow, but Rachel stood silent.
“I was bidden to tell thee of the last words of the Black One,” went on Umbopa hurriedly; “but what need is there to tell thee anything who knowest all? They were that he heard the sound of the running of the feet of a great white people which shall stamp out the children of the Zulus.”