Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases: Seventeen Short Stories. Gibbon Perceval

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ