Chapter Six.
Little Tobè.
“It wastes me more
Than were’t my picture fashioned out of wax,
Stuck with a magic needle, and then buried
In some foul dunghill.”
The Duchess of Malfy.
One
For nearly two years after Madilenda came to the kraal of Sikulumè as his third wife, she was fairly happy, Mamagobatyana, the “great wife,” was neither jealous nor exacting; she was fat and lazy, and took her highest enjoyment in sleeping in the hot sunshine on the lee-side of the hut. Nozika, the second wife, had apparently been selected by her spouse for her muscle; she was extremely stupid and not particularly well-favoured, but powerfully built, and equal to any amount of hard work in the fields.
Madilenda was of a type somewhat uncommon among native women. She was light in colour, with finely-formed features and very prominent eyes. Her figure was the perfection of symmetry. According to European taste she was very pretty indeed, but the ordinary native would have preferred a woman somewhat larger built, and generally of a coarser type.
Near the end of the first year her baby,—“Little Tobè,”—was born, and then for a time she was perfectly happy. The baby came just at the end of spring. During the previous four months she had not been expected to work, and she had a nice long rest to look forward to before the hoeing of the maize and millet-fields would commence.
Sikulumè was a man whom every one found it easy to get on with, and he made in every respect a capital husband. He was kind to his wives, and they were very fond of him. He was rich, and the skin bags and calabashes at his kraal were full of milk. Winter and summer, food was plentiful, work was easy, and the three wives were not jealous of each other. Truly, Madilenda’s lines were cast in comparatively pleasant places.
Sikulumè’s kraal was situated in a deep valley through which one of the tributaries of the Kenira river runs. He was a Hlubi Kafir. Living in one of the territories administered by the Government of the Cape Colony, he had nothing to fear from the rapacity of the chief, or the malice of the witch-doctor.