Chapter Six.
The Gratitude of a Savage.
The crescent moon had just sunk, but the stars shone brightly down through the limpid lens of the African night. Nomandewu sat on a flat stone, moaning and talking to herself. She was a tall, gaunt Kaffir woman of about thirty years of age. Three weeks previously, little Nolala, her only child, had accidentally met her death. Ever since, Nomandewu had been distraught with grief.
The spot where the bereaved mother sat was surrounded by a low, broken wall of sods, which formed a circle of about fifteen feet in diameter. This was all remaining of the hut in which she and her husband had lived. At his death, some two years previously, the hut, in accordance with Native custom, had been burnt to the ground.
Just after the death of her husband Nomandewu obtained employment as cook in the household of John Westbrook, a cattle-farmer whose herds grazed in one of those deep valleys which cleave the base of the Great Winterberg Mountain. Mrs Westbrook had a little daughter of the same age as Nolala, and the two children used to play together, day by day. A low rustic seat, formed of a portion of a tree-trunk sunk into the ground in an upright position, stood outside the verandah of the homestead, under a spreading oak... In this little Lucy would sit, Nolala squatting before her on the ground like a small Buddhist idol cut in ebony. Thus the children would play, for hours at a time, some game of their own invention. In it handclaps, names of people and shrieks of laughter seemed to be the principal features.
This was the manner of Nolala’s death: one morning Mrs Westbrook went into the dairy to attend to the cream. The children followed, as was usual, in expectation of getting thick milk. The cream had to be put into a large earthenware jar which was kept upon a high shelf. Mrs Westbrook was in the act of lifting the vessel from its place when a large tarantula, which sprawled on the stopper, ran down her arm. She had a special dread of these creatures, with which the house was infested. In her terror she let the jar slip through her paralysed hands, and it crashed down upon the upturned face of little Nolala, who was standing next to her. The child fell to the floor with her neck broken.
Nomandewu became frantic with grief. Taking the body in her arms she rushed into the forest. It was several days before she reappeared, and then she could not be induced to reveal how the body had been disposed of. She did not resume her service, but went to live with her brother in the location formed by the farm-servants’ huts, on the other side of the valley.
Mrs Westbrook was sorely distressed at the catastrophe. She tried hard to interview the bereaved mother, but Nomandewu stalked off with a terrible expression upon her face, whenever her mistress approached.