They noticed that she spoke in quite a different tone to her usual one, and in an uncouth idiom they had never heard from her before.
“Hush, dear,” said Helena, soothingly. She guessed what had happened. The doctor had told her that an awakening of the girl’s dormant memory might happen at any time.—“Hush,—do not trouble to think just now. You will remember it all by and by.”
Helena drew the blind, frightened face down upon her generous breast, whilst Gertrude softly stroked the rigid hand which had seized one of hers with such a convulsive grasp as caused her acute pain. The blind girl’s brain was reeling perilously near to madness. Like a flood came the memory of her journey and its purpose—of the misery of disappointment, and the terror of the baboons. Her mind began anew at the flight from Elandsfontein, and retraced every painful step of the journey which came to such a tragic close in the inhospitable streets of the city. The whole pageant went through her consciousness in a whirling phantasmagoria.
When she reached that stage of her adventures wherein she left the dwelling of the kind old coloured woman, she instinctively passed her hand over her knees to feel if she still wore the dress which had been lent her then. Again she ascended the rugged slopes of Table Mountain, with her ears filled with the horrid shouts of the persecuting boys. The long-waited-for Kanu seemed so imminent that she bent her ear to listen for his expected step in the sound of the rocking surf. Then her terror of the baboons returned upon her like a hurricane sweeping everything away in fury; she started up with a shriek and tried to rush away.
“Oh God,—the baboons. Kanu—Kanu.”
“Hush—hush, dear,” said the soothing voice of Helena; “you are safe with us; nothing can hurt you. Feel—we are holding you safely.”
The sudden rupture of the cells in the blind girl’s brain, within which the terrors of that dire morning of four years back were pent, was like the breaking of the Seventh Seal. The shock almost unseated her reason. However, she gradually came to realise that she was with friends, whose tender touch brought comfort and a sense of safety. For the moment the last four years of her life were as effectually blotted out as though they had never been. Then, as a tortured sea gradually glasses over when the storm-cloud has passed on, although it yet heaves with silent unrest, her mind began to calm down and the recollection of more recent events to dawn upon the verge of her consciousness.
“But where is Kanu? Why did he not come back to me?”
“Was Kanu the Bushman who led you about?” asked Helena, gently.
“Kanu left me on the mountain and went to find out where the Governor lived.—My father—How long ago is it—Where have I been?”