Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases

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VROUW GROBELAAR

AND HER LEADING CASES

SEVENTEEN SHORT STORIES

BY

PERCEVAL GIBBON

AUTHOR OF SOULS IN BONDAGE

NEW YORK
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
MCMVI

Copyright, 1906, by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

Published, January, 1906

TO MY WIFE

CONTENTS

UNTO THE THIRD GENERATION

THE DREAM-FACE

THE AVENGER OF BLOOD

THE HANDS OF THE PITIFUL WOMAN

PIET NAUDE'S TREK

LIKE UNTO LIKE

COUNTING THE COLORS

THE KING OF THE BABOONS

MORDER DRIFT

A GOOD END

VASCO'S SWEETHEART

THE PERUVIAN

TAGALASH

THE HOME KRAAL

THE SACRIFICE

THE COWARD

HER OWN STORY

UNTO THE THIRD GENERATION

The Vrouw Grobelaar, you must know, is a lady of excellent
standing, as much by reason of family connections (for she
was a Viljoen of the older stock herself, and buried in her
time three husbands of estimable parentage) as of her
wealth. Her farms extended from the Ringkop on the one side
to the Holgaatspruit on the other, which is more than a
day's ride; and her stock appears to be of that ideal
species which does not take rinderpest. Her Kafirs were
born on the place, and will surely die there, for though
the old lady is firmly convinced that she rules them with a
rod of iron, the truth is she spoils them atrociously; and
were it not that there is an excellent headman to her
kraals, the niggers would soon grow pot-bellied in
idleness.

The Vrouw Grobelaar is a lady who commands respect. Her
face is a portentous mask of solemnity, and her figure is
spacious beyond the average of Dutch ladies, so that
certain chairs are tacitly conceded her as a monopoly. The
good Vrouw does not read or write, and having never found a
need in herself for these arts, is the least thing
impatient of those who practice them. The Psalms, however,
she appears to know by heart; also other portions of the
Bible; and is capable of spitting Scripture at you on the
smallest provocation. Indeed she bubbles with morality, and
a mention of "the accursed thing" (which would appear to be
a genus and not a species, so many articles of human
commerce does it embrace) will set her effervescing with
mingled blame and exhortation. But if punishment should
come in question, as when a Kafir waylaid and slew a
chicken of hers, she displays so prolific an invention in
excuses, so generous a partiality for mercy, that not the
most irate induna that ever laid down a law of his own
could find a pretext for using the stick.

She lives in her homestead with some half-dozen of nieces,
a nephew or two, and a litter of grandchildren, who know
the old lady to the core, cozen and blarney her as they
please, and love her with a perfect unanimity. I think she
sometimes blames herself for her tyrannical usage of these
innocents, who nevertheless thrive remarkably on it. You
can hardly get on your horse at the door without maiming an
infant, and you can't throw a stone in any direction
without killing a marriageable damsel. They pervade the old
place like an atmosphere; the kraals ring with their
voices, and the Kafirs spend lives of mingled misery and
delight at their irresponsible hands.

I do not think I need particularize in the matter of these
youngsters, save as regards Katje. Katje refuses to be
ignored, and she was no more to be overlooked than a tin-
tack in the sole of your foot. She was the only child of
Vrouw Grobelaar's youngest brother, Barend Viljoen, who
died while lion-hunting in the Fever Country. At the time I
am thinking of Katje might have been eighteen. She was like
a poppy among the stubble, so delicate in her bodily
fabric, and yet so opulent in shape and coloring. She was
the nicest child that ever gave a kiss for the asking (you
could kiss her as soon as look at her), but she was also
the very devil to deal with if she saw fit to take a
distaste of you. I saw her once smack a fathom of able-
bodied youth on both sides of the head with a lusty vigor
that constrained the sufferer to howl. And I have seen her
come to meet a man--well, me, with the readiest lips and the
friendliest hand in the world. Oh, Katje was like a blotch
of color in one's life; something vivid, to throw the days
into relief.

A stranger to the household might have put down Katje's
behavior towards the Vrouw Grobelaar as damnable, no less;
and in the early days of my acquaintance with the family I
was somewhat tempted to this opinion myself. For she not
only flouted the old lady to her face, but would upon
occasion disregard her utterly, and do it all with what I
can only call a swagger that seemed to demand a local
application of drastic measures. But Katje knew her victim,
if such a word can be applied to the Vrouw Grobelaar, and
never prodded her save on her armor. For instance, to say
the Kafirs were overdriven and starved was nothing if not
flattery--to say they were spoiled and coddled would have
been mere brutality.

With it all, the Vrouw Grobelaar went her placid way, like
an elephant over egg-shells. Her household did her one
service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and
that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was
in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran
to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she
drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was
often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams
had trespassed on devilish domains. The Vrouw Grobelaar
believed most entirely in Kafir magic, in witchcraft and
second sight, in ghosts and infernal possession, in
destiny, and in a very personal arch-fiend who presided
over a material hell when not abroad in the world on the
war-path. Besides, she had stores of tales from the lives
of neighbors and acquaintances: often horrible enough, for
the Boers are a lonely folk and God's finger writes large
in their lives.

I almost think I can see it now--the low Dutch kitchen with
its plank ceiling, the old lady in her chair, with an
illustrative forefinger uplifted to punctuate the periods
of her tale, the embers, white and red, glowing on the
hearth, and the intent shadow-pitted faces of the hearers,
agape for horrors.

There was a tale I heard her tell to Katje, when that
damsel had seen fit to observe, apropos of disobedience in
general, that her grandfather's character had nothing to do
with hers. The tale was in plaintive Dutch, the language
that makes or breaks a story-teller, for you must hang your
point on the gutturals or you miss it altogether.

"Look at my husband's uncle," said the old lady. "A sinful
man, forever swearing and cursing, and drinking. His farm
was the worst in the district; the very Kafirs were ashamed
of it when they went to visit the kraals. But Voss (that
was the name of my husband's uncle) cared nothing so long
as there was a horse to ride into the dorp on and some
money to buy whiskey with. And he drank so much and carried
on so wickedly that his wife died and his girls married
poor men and never went to stay with their father. So at
last he lived in the house, with only his son to help him
from being all alone.

"This son was Barend Voss, a great hulking fellow, with the
strength of a trek-ox, and never a word of good or bad to
throw away on any one. But his face was the face of a
violent man. He had blue eyes with no pleasantness about
them, but a sort of glitter, as though there were live
coals in his brain. He did not drink like his father; and
these two would sit together in the evenings, the one
bleared and stupid with liquor, and the other watching him
in silence across the table.

"They spoke seldom to one another; and it would often
happen that the father would speak to the son and get not a
word of answer--only that lowering ugly stare that had grown
to be a way with the boy.

"I think those two men must have grown to hate each other
in the evenings as they sat together; the younger one
despising and loathing his father, and the father hating
his son for so doing. I have often wondered how they never
came to blows--before they did, that is.

"One morning old Voss rode off to the dorp, and Barend
watched him from the door till he went out of sight in the
kloof. All the day he was away, and when he came back again
it was late in the night. Barend was sitting in his usual
place at the table scowling over his folded arms.

"Old Voss had not ridden off his liquor; and he staggered
into the house singing a dirty English song. He had a
bottle in his hands, and banged it down on the table in
front of his son.

"'Now, old sheep's head,' he shouted, 'have a drink and
drop those airs of yours.'

"Barend sat where he was, and said not a word--just watched
the other.

"'Come on,' shouted old Voss; 'I'm not going to drink
alone. If you won't take it pleasantly I'll make you take
it, and be damned to you!'

"Barend sat still, scowling always. I dare say a sober man
would have seen something in his eyes and let be. But old
Voss was blind to his danger, and shouted on.

"The younger man kept his horrid silence, and never moved,
till the father was goaded to a drunken rage.

"'If you won't drink,' he screamed, 'take that,' and he
flung a full cupful of the spirit right in the young man's
face.

"Then everything was in the fire. The two men fought in the
room like beasts, oversetting table and lamp, and stamping
into the fire on the hearth. Barend was mad with a passion
of long nursing, and hewed with his great fists till the
old man fell heavily to the ground, and lay moaning.

"Barend stood over him, glowering. 'Swine!' he said to his
father; 'swine and brute! get you out of this house to the
veld. You are no father of mine.'

"But the old man was much hurt, and lay where he had
fallen, groaning as though he had not heard.

"'I will have you out of this,' said the son. 'If you are
come to die, die on the road. I had wished you dead for
years.'

"So he wound his hand, with the knuckles all over blood, in
the old man's white hair, and threw open the door with his
other hand.

"'Out with you!' he shouted, and dragged him down the step
and into the yard. Yes, he dragged him across the yard to
the gate; and when he unfastened the gate the old man
opened his eyes and spoke.

"'Leave me here,' he said, speaking slowly and painfully.
'Leave me here, my son. Thus far I dragged my father.'"

The Vrouw Grobelaar, to point a weighty moral, turned her
face upon Katje. But that young lady was sleeping soundly
with her mouth open.

THE DREAM-FACE

"I wish," said Katje, looking up from her book--"I wish a
man would come and make me marry him."

The Vrouw Grobelaar wobbled where she sat with
stupefaction.

"Yes," continued Katje, musingly casting her eyes to the
rafters, "I wish a man would just take me by the hand--so--
and not listen to anything I said, nor let me go however I
should struggle, and carry me off on the peak of his saddle
and marry me. I think I would be willing to die for a man
who could do that."

The Vrouw Grobelaar found her voice at last. "Katje," she
said with deep-toned emphasis, "you are talking wickedness,
just wickedness. Do you think I would let a man--any man, or
perhaps an Englishman--carry you off like a strayed ewe?"

"The sort of man I'm thinking of," replied the maiden,
"wouldn't ask you for permission. He'd simply pick me up,
and away he'd go."

At times, and in certain matters, Vrouw Grobelaar would
display a ready acumen.

"Tell me, Katje," she said now, "who is this man?"

Then Katje dropped her book and, sitting upright with an
unimpeachable surprise, stared at the old lady.

"I'm not thinking of any man," she remarked calmly. "I was
just wishing there was a man who would have the pluck to do
it."

The Vrouw Grobelaar shook her head. "Good Burghers don't
carry girls away," she said. "They come and drink coffee,
and sit with them, and talk about the sheep."

"And behave as if they had never worn boots before, and
didn't know what to do with their hands," added the maiden.
"Aunt, am I a girl to marry a man who upsets three cups of
coffee in half an hour and borrows a handkerchief to wipe
his knees?"

Now there could be no shadow of doubt that this was an
open-breasted cut at young Fanie van Tromp, whose affection
for Katje was a matter of talk on the farms, and whose
overtures that young lady had consistently sterilized with
ridicule.

The Vrouw Grobelaar was void of delicacy. "Fanie is a good
lad," she said, "and when his father dies he will have a
very large property."

"It'll console him for not adding me to his live stock,"
retorted Katje.

"He is handsome, too," continued the old lady. "His beard
is as black as--"

"A carrion-crow," added Katje promptly.

"Quite," agreed the Vrouw Grobelaar, with a perfect
unconsciousness of the unsavoriness of the suggestion.

"And he walks like a duck with sore feet," went on Katje.
"He is as graceful as a trek-ox, and his conversational
talents are those of a donkey in long grass."

"All that is a young girl's nonsense," observed the old
lady. "I was like that once myself. But when one grows a
little older and fatter, and there is less about one to
take a man's eye,--a fickle thing, Katje, a fickle thing,--
one looks for more in a husband than a light foot and a
smart figure."

Katje was a trifle abashed, for all the daughters of her
house, were they never so slender, grew tubby in their
twenties.

"Besides," continued the worthy Vrouw, "your talk is chaff
from a mill. It must come out to leave the meal clean.
Perhaps, after all, Fanie is the man to carry you off. I
think you would not take so much trouble to worry him if
you thought nothing of him."

The Vrouw Grobelaar had never heard of Beatrice and her
Benedick, but she had a notion of the principle.

"I hate him," cried Katje with singular violence.

"I think not," replied the old lady. "Sometimes the thing
we want is at our elbows, and we cannot grasp it because we
reach too far. Did I ever tell you how Stoffel Struben
nearly went mad for love of his wife?"

"No," said Katje, unwillingly interested. "He was something
of a fool to begin with," commenced the Vrouw Grobelaar.
"He chose his wife for a certain quality of gentleness she
had, and though I will not deny she made him a good wife
and a patient, still gentleness will not boil a pot. He was
a fine fellow to look at; big and upstanding, with plenty
of blood in him, and a grand mat of black hair on top. He
moved like a buck; so ready on his feet and so lively in
all his movements. He might have carried you off, Katje,
and done you no good in the end.

"He was happy with his pretty wife for a while, and might
have been happy all his life and died blessedly had he but
been able to keep from conjuring up faces in his mind and
falling in love with them. Greta, his wife, had hair like
golden wheat, so smooth and rippled with light; and no
sooner had he stroked his fill of it than he conceived nut-
brown to be the most lovely color of woman's hair. Her eyes
were blue, and for half a year he loved them; then hazel
seemed to him a better sort. I said he was a fool, didn't
I?

"So his marriage to Greta became a chain instead of a
union, while the poor lass fretted her heart out over his
dark looks and short answers. He was shallow, Katje,
shallow; he had the mere capacity for love, but it was a
short way to the bottom of it. You will see by and by that
the men who deserve least always want most. Stoffel had no
right to a woman at all; when he had one, and she a good
girl, he let his eyes rove for others.

"So he went about his farm with his mind straying and his
heart abroad. If you spoke to him, he paused awhile, and
then looked at you with a start as though freshly waked. He
saw nothing as he went, neither his wife with the questions
in her eyes that she shamed to say with her lips, nor the
child that crowed at him from her arms. He was deaf and
blind to the healthy world, to all save the silly dreams
his poisoned soul fed on.

"Well, wicked or not, it is at least unsafe not to look
where one is going. This was a thing Stoffel never did:
since he overlooked his wife, it was not to be expected he
would see a strand of fencing-wire on the ground. So he
rode on to it, and down came his horse. Down came Stoffel
too, and there was a stone handy on the place where his
head lit to let some of the moonshine out of him. He saw a
heavenful of stars for a moment, and then saw nothing for a
long time. Save--one strange thing!

"When life came back to him he was in his bed very sore and
empty, and very mightily surprised to see himself alive,
after all. He was exceedingly weak and somewhat misty as to
how it all had happened. But one thing he seemed to
remember--more than seemed, so strong, so plain, so deep was
his memory of it. He thought he recalled pain and
blindness, and a sudden light, in which he saw a face close
to his, a girl's face, pitiful, tender, loving, and charged
with more than all the sweetness of beauty that his sick
heart could long for. The thing was like one of those
dreams from which one wakes sad and thoughtful, as when one
has overstepped the boundary mark of life and cast an eye
on heaven.

"It was no face that he knew, and he turned on his pillow
to think of it. He could not believe it was a dream. 'It
was a soul,' he said to himself. 'I knew, I was sure, that
somewhere there was such a face, but it only came to my
eyes when I was on the borderland of death. If ever God
gave a thing to a mortal man, he should have given me that
woman.'

"So with such blasphemous thoughts he idled through the
days of his sickness, very quiet, very weak, and kind to
his wife beyond the ordinary. Of course she, poor woman,
knew nothing of the silly tale, and when her husband gave
her those little caresses one would not withhold from an
affectionate dog, she blessed God that he was come to
himself again. You see, Katje dear, that as a man demands
more than he can claim with right, a woman must often make
shift with less. It is well to learn this early.

"Stoffel grew well in time, and got about again. But the
stone had made less of a dent in his skull than the face in
his heart, and he was changed altogether. He served a false
god, but served it faithfully. He was very gentle and
patient with every one, almost like a saint, and he took
infinite pains with the work of his farm. He would hurt no
living thing--not even so much as lash a team of lazy oxen.
You would have thought Kafirs would have done as they
pleased with him, but they obeyed his least word, and hung
on his eyes for orders as though they worshipped him.
Kafirs and dogs will sometimes see farther than a
Christian.

"Meanwhile Greta came to die. It was a chill, perhaps, with
a trifle of fever on top of that, and it carried her off
like a candle-flame when it is blown out. She died well--
very well indeed. None of your whimpering and moaning and
slinking out of the back-door of life when nobody is
looking; nor that unconscious death that shuts out a chance
of a few last words. No; Greta saw with her eyes and spoke
with her mouth to the last, then folded her hands and died
as handsomely as one would wish to see. She prayed a
trifle, as she should; forgave her brother's wife for
speaking ill of her, and hoped her tongue would not lure
her to destruction. I have heard her brother's wife never
forgave her for it.

"On the last day she sent everybody out of the room save
only Stoffel, and him she held by the hand as he sat beside
the bed. She knew she was drawing to her end (the dying
always know it) and feared nothing. But there was a matter
she wanted to know.

"'Stoffel,' she said when they were alone, won't you tell
me now who that woman is?'

"'What woman?' said Stoffel amazed, for of his dream in his
sickness he had spoken to no living soul.

"She stroked his hand and shook her head at him. Ah,
Stoffel,' she said, 'it is long since I first made place
for that woman, and if I grudged her you, I never grudged
you her. I was content with what you gave me, Stoffel; I
thought you right, whatever you did, and I go to God still
thinking so. All our life, Stoffel, she prevailed against
me, and I submitted; but now, at this last moment, I want
to have the better of it. Tell me, who was it?'

"And Stoffel, looking on the floor, answered, 'I swear to
you there was no woman.'

"She replied, 'And ere the cock crows thou shall deny me
thrice.' She turned her head and looked at him with a
pitiful drawn smile that would have dragged tears from a
demon. 'Was she dark, Stoffel? I am fair, you know; but my
hair--look at it, Stoffel,--my hair is golden. Did you never
notice it before? She was tall, I suppose? Well, I am
something short, but, Stoffel, I am slender, too. Will you
not so much as tell me her name, Stoffel? It is not as if I
blamed you.'

"A truth, hardly won, is always set on a pile of lies. 'How
do you know there was a woman?' asked Stoffel.

"'How?' she repeated. 'How I know! Stoffel, you never had a
thought I did not know; never a hope but I hoped it for
you, nor a fear but I thought how to safeguard you. I never
lived but in you, Stoffel.

"'Let us speak nothing but the truth now,' she went on.
'You and I have always been beyond the need for lies to one
another, and as I wait here for you to tell me, I have one
hand in yours and the other in Christ's. Let me not think
hardly of her as I go.'

"'You would not curse her?' he said quickly. "'Not even
that' she answered, smiling a little. 'And if you will not
tell me, I will die even content with that, since it is
your wish.'

"'Listen,' said Stoffel then. And forthwith, looking
backwards and forwards in shame and sorrow, he told the
tale. He told how he saw a face, which laid hold on his
life ever after, how it governed and compelled him with the
mere memory, and hung in his mind like a deed done. And he
also told how he hoped after death to see that face with
the eyes of his soul, and dwell with it in heaven.

"When he had finished he cast a glance at his wife. She was
lying on her back, holding his hand still, and smiling up
to the ceiling with a pleasant face of contentment.

"'Can you forgive me?' he cried, and would have gone on to
protest and explain, but she pressed his hand and he was
silent.

"'Forgive you!' she said at last. 'Forgive you! No; but I
will bless you for all of it. So it seems I have won after
all, but now I wish I had let be. It was no spirit you saw,
Stoffel. There was a woman there, and while you lay white
and lifeless she held you in her arms, and bent over you.
And just for one moment you opened your eyes and saw her,
while her face was close to yours. Then you died again, and
remained so for a day and a night Was there love in her
eyes, Stoffel?'

"'Love!' cried Stoffel, and fell silent.

"In a minute he spoke again. 'I am helpless,' he said, 'and
you are strong. But, curse and hate me as you will, you
must tell me who this woman was.'

"'A little time since it was I that asked,' she said, 'and
you would not tell me.'

"'I beseech you,' he said.

"'You shall never ask twice,' she answered gently. 'I will
tell you, but not this moment.'

"So for a while they sat together, and the sun began to go
down, and blazed on the window-panes and on the golden hair
of the dying woman. She lay as if in a mist of glory, and
smiled at Stoffel. He, looking at her, could not lack of
being startled by the beauty that had come over her face
and the joy that weighed her eyelids.

"She stirred a little, and sighed. Stoffel cast an arm
round her to hold her up, and his heart bounded woefully
when he felt how light she was. Her head came to his
shoulder, as to a place where it belonged, and their lips
met.

"'Shall I tell you now?' she said in a whisper.

"Stoffel did not answer, so she asked again. 'Will you
know, Stoffel?'

"'No,' he answered. 'I'm cured.'

"'I will tell you, then,' she cried. 'No,' he repeated.
'Let it be.'

"So together they sat for a further while, and the time
grew on for going. She was to die with the sun; she had
said it. And as they sat both could see through the window
the sun floating lower, with an edge in its grave already,
and the rim of the earth black against it. The noises of
the veld and the farm came in to them, and they drew closer
together.

"Neither wept; they were too newly met for that. But
Stoffel felt a dull pain of sorrow overmastering him, and
soon he groaned aloud.

"'My wife, my wife,' he cried.

"She rested wholly on his arm, and shivered a little.

"'Stoffel,' she said in a voice that henceforth was to
whisper forever, 'Stoffel, you love me?'

"'As God sees me,' he answered. "'Listen,' she said, and
fought with the tide that was fast drowning her words.
'That face--you--saw . . . was . . . mine!'

"She smiled as his arm tightened on her, and died so
smiling."

There was silence in the shadowy room as the tale finished,
until it was broken by the Vrouw Grobelaar.

"You see?" she said.

"Yes," replied Katje, very quietly.

THE AVENGER OF BLOOD

The Vrouw Grobelaar entered in haste, closed the door, and
sat down panting.

"If my last husband were alive," she said--"if any of them
were alive, that creature would be shot for looking at an
honest woman with such eyes," and she cast an anxious
glance over her shoulder.

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