"Once in Royal David's city—"
the sound of the tune floated across the brain which for so long had heard no such strains. He saw himself, a boy with yellow curls, in which she had delighted, lifting his piercing childish treble at her bidding. What would she not have given for the English Mission which had come to Slabbert's Poort since her death, and the ministrations of Carol Mayne! Bert had not entered a church now, for years. As he stood by her silent piano, he was invaded by a vague feeling that he could hardly expect a neglected God to take his part.
The room contained an old bureau and comfortable chairs. There were good engravings on the walls. The carpet was still serviceable, and there were clean curtains in the windows. From the wall before him smiled down his mother's frank, good-humoured face—the face of Alice Brooke—a brave girl, who had earned her living among strangers in a strange land, until the rich Boer farmer had persuaded her to be his wife. Beside her, the broad-bearded, benevolent face of her devoted husband, a Boer of the best type.
Bert folded his arms, and gazed at them both, with a heart full of curious longings, rebellions and regrets. Mrs. Mestaer had died when he was eight years old. Her death was the result of an accident—a runaway horse had cut short the happy life on that out-of-the-way farm; and people said that Mestaer had never rallied from the shock. He became an old man in a few short months. He turned a deaf ear to those who urged him to take some expansive Boer lady to look after him and his motherless boy, and he died of pneumonia when Bert was seventeen, seeming only too glad of the chance to be gone.
Bert did not remember feeling much grief when he was told of his father's death. He had been chiefly conscious of the excitement of leaving school and coming home to take possession of his property, and ruffle it in the streets of Slabbert's Poort.
Just at that time had come the diamond-finding craze, which changed the little rural hamlet into a haunt of needy adventurers, gamblers and sharpers, Slabbert's Poort was to be the new Kimberley. The usual influx of rabble followed; the usual mad period of wild speculation. To let off big portions of his land to speculators had seemed to young Mestaer far more "sporting" than to continue stolidly to farm the precious acres. He chummed in with the prospectors, who were only too ready to flatter a young fellow with money in his pockets. The result was that his proper business languished; and now it was universally allowed that the diamond-bearing capacities of the locality had been absurdly over estimated.
Bert had fallen into ways which would have wrung his mother's heart, when, for good or ill, the white face of Millie crossed his horizon, to remain as a fixed star in his heavens.
To-night he was beginning to realise all that it might have meant for him if his mother had lived. She was English; she would have understood and befriended Millie; she would have told him the things that English girls demand of their lovers, and have devised ways in which the acquaintance might be encouraged.
There was not, as it happened, a solitary English-woman in the place. Mayne, at the Mission, was a bachelor, so could not be used as a chaperon. Millie had never seen the interior of Bert's house in her life. He felt sure that if she could see the rooms made comfortable by his English mother, it must to her seem preferable to her own miserable quarters. She only saw him slouching about the streets, in the unkempt condition affected by his pals; she took him, he felt sure, for other than he was, or than he felt himself capable of becoming for her sake.
Remorsefully he remembered that Millie had seen him drunk. He had not cared at the time—the thing was growing far too fashionable to be looked upon as a disgrace in the little place which had been so pastoral—but love was teaching him strange things, and now he felt as though he were looking upon the sordid episode of drunkenness through Millie's tired, contemptuous eyes.