"My Dierck! My little Dierck! O God! God!—--"
Standing with that tragic purple mask turned upwards to the silent sky, and the wild eyes blazing, and the great fist at the end of the uplifted arm brandished in the Face of Heaven itself, the Boer mother demanded of her Maker why this thing had been done?
"He was so good. Never a fib since last I gave him the ox-reim end to taste. Never a lump of sugar or a cookie or a plum pilfered—he would take them as bold as brass before your face if you didn't give. He said the night-prayer regularly. For the morning, Lord, Thou knowest boys want to be up and at mischief as soon as they have rubbed the sleep out of their eyes—'tis only natural. And the father a God-fearing man, and me a woman of piety. For when have I backslidden before Thee? If any of mine have hung back when I told them to loop and do a thing, or sneaked off and hid when we were inspanned for the kerk-going, did I fail to whack them as a mother should? Nooit, nooit! And now—Death has fallen out of the sky upon the Benjamin of my bosom. Oh, blasted be the eyesight and withered be the hand of the man that sighted and laid and fired the gun!"
She cursed the Kaiser's blue-and-white-uniformed gunner in every function of his body and every corner of his soul, waking and sleeping, dying and dead, with fluent Scriptural curses. The crowded faces about her went white. Some of the women were crying, others shook their heads:
"Thim that puts the Bad Black Wish on odhers finds sorra knock harrd at their dure," said an Irish voice oracularly. "An' who but herself did be callin' down all manner av' misfortune on ivery wan that crassed her?"
"It's a judgment—my opinion," agreed the thin young woman who had been peeling potatoes, and who wore a wisp of draggled crape round a soiled rush hat. "Never a shell busted but you'd a-heered her say she hoped that one had sent another parcel of verdant rooineks to Hell. And me sitting over against her with crape on for my husband and baby. 'Tis a judgment, that's what I say."
"Oh, hush, Mrs. Lennan!" said the Mother-Superior. "Be pitiful and forget. She did not think—she had not suffered. Be pitiful, now that her hour has come!"
The thick voice of the Boer woman broke out again:
"Did ever I miss of the Nachtmaal? Alamachtig, no! Virtuous as Sarah have I lain in the marriage-bed—never a sly look for another, and my husband with dropsy-legs as thick as boomstammen, and sixty years upon his loins. Thou knewest, and yet the joy of my life is taken from me. Where wert Thou, O God of Israel, when they killed my little Dierck?"