The children started a kind of chorus:
"White rat! White rat!
Ours is the corn that makes you fat!"
"Not much longer then," muttered the half-tipsy Vrouw. "Another week or two will see the end of it now; and then—out she goes! Aha! She'll wish before long that she had kept a civil tongue in her head. As sure as I'm a living woman, one thrashing I'll give her before she goes! Oh, there's a long account I've got against her—it wants paying, that it does! Much we've had to bear from him, but most from her that encouraged him from a baby to defy me. But I'll take it out on her, once he's gone, the little insolent, English devil!"
CHAPTER III
THE RIVALS
"But as if he loved you! No, not he.
Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain;
Who ever heard that another, free
As I, young, prosperous, sound and sane,
Poured life out, proffered it—'Half a glance
Of those eyes of yours, and I drop the glass!'"
—ROBERT BROWNING.
Bert Mestaer flung open the door of his farm kitchen, and strode in.
All was clean and quiet. His supper, covered up in a saucepan, had been left on the stove. Anna, his Boer housekeeper, had long since retired to her heavy slumbers.
The eye of the master roved round the kitchen that night, like one who saw it for the first time. He gazed upon the ceiling, and noted that it needed fresh lime-wash. He contemplated the shining rows of plates on the dresser, as though taking a new pride in his possessions; and then, moving forward, he pushed open a door at the opposite side of the room, and found himself in darkness and coolness. He struck a light, held it to a candle on the table, and his critical glance travelled round the parlour which had been his mother's pride.
There was a piano; he had a dim memory of her sitting there, playing to him, the hymns that had charmed her own English childhood—