“Come, Jacomyn’, tell me what is the matter.”
“Oh, Adrian,—I am afraid to tell you for fear you would despise me.”
“Despise you? No, you know I could never do that.”
“I am so unhappy because—because you used to like me so much, and now you never speak to me.”
Jacomina had now come to believe in the genuineness of her own woe, so she fell into a flood of real and violent tears. Adrian gradually gathered her into his arms, and she allowed herself to be consoled. After a very few minutes a full understanding was arrived at; then Jacomina recovered herself with remarkable rapidity, and recollected that the wagons were far ahead. Adrian’s shyness had by this time completely gone, so much so that Jacomina had some difficulty in getting him to make a start. In fact she had to escape from his arms by means of a subterfuge and dart away along the road. Her lover did not lose much time in following her. The course was interrupted by amatory interludes whenever the wayside boskage was propitious, so it was not before the outspanning took place that the wagons were reached.
When the blushing pair stood before Uncle Diederick, that man of experiences did not need to have matters explained to him.
“Well, Jacomina,” he said, “I’ll have to see about getting a wife myself now. But you need not be afraid on account of Aunt Emerencia; no one, who is not a fool, buys an old mare when he can get a young one for the same price.”
Uncle Diederick, who had not been to Cape Town since the days of his early youth, was very much impressed by everything he saw, but by nothing so much as the chemists’ shops. He never got tired at gazing at the rows of bottles with their various coloured contents. He wandered from one drug emporium to another, until he made the acquaintance of an affable young assistant who dispensed with an engaging air from behind a counter deeply laden with wondrous appliances and enticing compounds. This young man loved experiment for its own sake, and he had a wide field for the exercise of his hobby among the poorer classes, who usually came to him for panaceas for their minor ills.
As Paul sat at the feet of Gamaliel, Uncle Diederick sat on a high-legged stool in the chemist’s shop, drinking in greedily the lore which fell from the young man’s lips, and making notes of the same in a tattered pocket-book, with a very stumpy pencil. Thus Uncle Diederick widened his medical knowledge considerably, until he felt that all worth knowing of the healing art was now at his command. The young man was the only one who suffered; his moral character became sadly deteriorated owing to the reverence with which Uncle Diederick regarded him, and the wrapt attention with which every essay of his was observed and recorded.