The elder woman was almost totally deaf, and the younger too much preoccupied by her physical ailments to pay much heed to the music. The musician, however, required no audience to enable him to reap the fullest enjoyment from the exercise of his art. He loved music for its proper sake, and under its influence could soar away above his sordid surroundings into a heaven of his own creation.
His favourite air was one which ran somewhat as follows. Upon it he would improvise and invent fantastic arabesques and ingenious variations:—
The old woman became more and more feeble, until at length she seemed to lose every faculty except an appetite for certain kinds of food. She lay for weeks without speaking. One night she surprised the others by complaining, in a very distinct voice, of feeling cold. Gert stirred up the embers and threw a few twigs upon them. Soon after this she said—
“Now I am going over the river.”
Next morning they found she was dead.
Gert walled up the mouth of the cave with the heaviest stones he could move, leaving the body inside. Then he and his wife departed. He made up his mind to attempt once more to obtain employment. Perhaps after six years his crime of truth-telling might have been forgotten or condoned. He now had an object in life—the realisation of the property which Fate had thrown in his way. He would first return to Namies, which was a place of congregating for Trek-Boers. Possibly he might be able to get employment there. Even if unsuccessful, however, there was still veld-kost to be had, and there were only two mouths to feed now. Alone, he might easily have made his way to other parts and disposed of the diamonds—even a tithe of their value would have made him a rich man—but his wife could only hobble a couple of miles a day at the very most. He could, of course, have left her to starve, but the thought of doing this never so much as crossed his mind.
So Gert Gemsbok, as stout-hearted as any paladian who ever carried a lance to the Holy Land, packed up his bundle of worn, dirty skins, and tied the pots on the top of it with some withes of twisted bark. He hid his bow and arrows in a dry crevice against the possibility of future needs—they would have been regarded, and rightly so, as the Mark of the Beast among the Trek-Boers. Then, with his ramkee slung under his arm and his miserable old wife hobbling upon cranky legs behind him—blinking in the sunlight to which she had been long unaccustomed—he struck boldly back to renew the battle of life among the men who had driven him forth to herd with the wild beasts.
His six diamonds, wrapped in a dirty rag, were sewn in a row along the bottom of his skin wallet.