"These mothers are too dreadful!"
—ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
Millie sat before the cold hearth in the stale, stuffy sitkamer, which always smelt of dirty dish-cloths and unwashed humanity. Her lips were pressed tightly together, her face was white as wax. In its repose, one could see signs of the inner strength, the unnameable charm which had captivated Bert and Amurrica, beyond question the two cleverest men of the place. No young Boer would have looked twice at her.
Her father was dead. The doctor had come and gone, and told the orphan what she knew before. The death had been quiet and painless, only Millie there. But now, the Boer widow was beside the corpse, noisily weeping and wailing, and the girl was shut out.
It was perhaps a fortunate thing for Arnold Lutwyche that his inherent vacillation of character had been joined to a feebleness of constitution which released him, at the age of forty-two, from the burden of the flesh. He had passed beyond reach of the Boer woman's tongue, and of the complications presented by those lumpish Boer children who bore his name. His difficulties were over; but what of his child?
His first wife—his own love, and Millie's mother—had been the earthly stay of the weak soul. Everyone had always called him weak; but he had had the wisdom to love the strong, the fortune to be loved by her again. While she lived, his own lack of stamina had hardly been apparent to him. He had never quite lost his sense of having a grudge against God since her death.
What he had been through since! From the moment when the handsome, courteous Englishman, with the dark-blue eyes, presented himself in answer to an advertisement from the buxom Boer heiress for a competent man to manage her farm, his misery had increased, his bonds had tightened. But it was over at last. He had slipped through Tante Wilma's coarse fingers, and gone flying home to her, his love, his stronghold.
Their child was left behind.
She had apparently no tears for him. The look on her tense features was more triumphant than grieving.
A smart tap on the door aroused her. She looked up in languid surprise. The old Dutch clock pointed to three o'clock in the morning. With a resigned shrug, she lifted her aching limbs, dragged herself to the door, and opened it. Mr. Mayne stood outside, and stepped in without speaking, closely followed by Bert Mestaer. Millie drew back, a look of anything but welcome on her expressive face.
"Go back!" said she to the young farmer. "I don't want you round here, nor any of your lot."