"Very kind of Mrs. du Preez," he murmured warily.
"She says all that. But I say"—the words rasped from Christian's lips—"I say you are a man rotten like an old egg and the breath in your mouth is a stink of wickedness. And I tell her that sometimes I get up from my food and go out because if I don't I shall stamp you to death. Gott verdam! Your dirty eyes and your old yellow teeth grinning—I stand them no longer. You have had rest and skoff—now you go."
Bailey's face showed some discomposure. His disadvantage lay in the danger that the Boer was plainly willing to be violent. He had returned to the house with the intention of announcing that on the morrow he would take his departure, but it was not the prospect of spending a night in the open that disconcerted him. It was simply that he disliked to be treated thus loftily by a man he despised. He stole a glance at Mrs. du Preez.
She was staring at her husband with shrewdness and doubt expressed in her face, as though she were checking her valuation of him by the fierce figure at the other end of the table, with big, leathery hands clutched on the edge of the board and thin, sun-tanned face intent and wrathful above the uneven beard. She was revisiting with an unsympathetic eye each feature of that irreconcilable factor in her life, her husband.
"D'you hear me?" thundered the Boer. "You go."
He pointed with sudden forefinger to the door, and his gesture was unspeakably daunting and wounding.
"Ye-es," hesitated Boy Bailey, and sighed. The pointing finger compelled him like a hand on his collar, and he moved with shuffling and unwilling feet to the chair where his hat lay. He fumbled with it as he picked it up and it fell to the floor. The finger did not for a moment pretermit its menacing command. He sighed again and drew the door open.
"Bailey." Mrs. du Preez spoke sharply, with a trembling catch in her voice. "Bailey, you stop here."
"Eh?" He turned in the doorway with alacrity. Another moment and it might have been too late.
"Go on," cried the Boer. "Out you go, or I 'll—"