Swallow

SWALLOW

have broken my heart as it would have broken that girl’s, perhaps more so, since girls change their fancies, but I am too old to change. Come here, my children.”

They came, and he laid one of his big hands upon the head of each of them, saying: –

“May the God in Heaven bless you both, who to me are one as dear as the other, making you happy with each other for many long years, and may He turn aside from you and from us the punishment that is due to all of us because, on account of our great love, we are holding you back, Ralph, from the home, the kin and the fortune to which you were born.” Then he kissed each of them on the forehead and let them go.

“If there be any punishment for that which is no sin, on my head be it,” said Ralph, “since never would I have gone from here by my own will.”

“Aye, aye,” answered Jan, “but who can take account of the talk of a lad in love? Well, we have committed the sin and we must bear the sorrow. Now I go out to see to the kraaling of the cattle, which we will drive off to the bush-veldt to-morrow at dawn, for I will have naught to do with these Scotchmen; your mother must settle with them as she wills, only I beg of her that she will tell me nothing of the bargain. Nay, do not come with me, Ralph; stop you with your dear, for to-morrow you will be parted for a while.”

So he went, and did not return again till late, and we three sat together and made pretense to be very happy, but somehow were a little sad, for Jan’s words about sin and sorrow stuck in our hearts, as the honest words of a stupid, upright man are apt to do.

61

H. RIDER HAGGARD

*

Now on the morrow at dawn, as had been arranged, Jan and Ralph rode away to the warm veldt with the cattle, leaving me and Suzanne to look after the farm. Three days later the Scotchmen came, and then it was that for love of Ralph and for the sake of the happiness of my daughter I sinned the greatest sin of all my life – the sin that was destined to shape the fates of others yet unborn.

I was seated on the stoep in the afternoon when I saw three white men and some Cape boys, their servants, riding up to the house.

“Here come those who would steal my boy from me,” I thought to myself, and, like Pharaoh, I hardened my heart.

Now in those days my sight was very good, and while the men were yet some way off I studied them all and made up my mind about them. First there was a large young man of five- and-twenty or thereabouts, and I noted with a sort of fear that he was not unlike to Ralph. The eyes were the same and the shape of the forehead, only this gentleman had a weak, uncertain mouth, and I judged that he was very good-humoured, but of an indolent mind. By his side rode another man of quite a different stamp, and middle-aged. “The lawyer,” I said to myself as I looked at his weasel-like face, bushy eyebrows, and red hair. Indeed, that was an easy guess, for who can mistake a lawyer, whatever his race may be? That trade is stronger than any blood, and leaves the same seal on all who follow it. Doubtless if those lawyers of whom the Lord speaks hard things in the Testament were set side by side with the lawyers who draw mortgage bonds and practise usury here in South Africa, they

62

SWALLOW

would prove to be as like to each other as are the grains of corn upon one mealie cob. Yes, when, all dressed the same, they stand together among the goats on the last day few indeed will know them apart.

“A fool and a knave,” said I to myself. “Well, perhaps I can deal with the knave and then the fool will not trouble me.”

As for the third man, I took no pains to study him, for I saw at once that he was nothing but an interpreter.

Well, up they rode to the stoep, the two Englishmen taking off their hats to me, after their foolish fashion, while the interpreter, who called me “Aunt,” although I was younger than he was, asked for leave to off-saddle, according to our custom. I nodded my head, and having given the horses to the Cape boys, they came up onto the stoep and shook hands with me as I sat. I was not going to rise to greet two Englishmen whom I already hated in my heart, first because they were Englishmen, and secondly because they were about to tempt me into sin, for such sooner or later we always learn to hate.

“Sit,” I said, pointing to the yellow-wood bench which was seated with strips of rimpi, and the three of them squeezed themselves into the bench and sat there like white-breasted crows on a bough; the young man staring at me with a silly smile, the lawyer peering this way and that, and turning up his sharp nose at the place and all in it, and the interpreter doing nothing at all, for he was a sensible man, who knew the habits of well-bred people and how to behave in their presence. After five minutes or so the lawyer grew impatient, and said something in a sharp voice, to which the interpreter answered, “Wait.”

63

H. RIDER HAGGARD

So they waited till, just as the young man was beginning to go to sleep before my very eyes, Suzanne came onto the verandah, whereupon he woke up in a hurry, and, jumping off the bench, began to bow and scrape and to offer her his seat, for there was no other.

“Suzanne,” I said, taking no notice of his bad manners, “get coffee,” and she went, looking less displeased at his grimaces than I would have had her do.

In time the coffee came, and they drank it, or pretended to, after which the lawyer began to grow impatient once more, and spoke to the interpreter, who said to me that they had come to visit us on a matter of business.

“Then tell him that it can wait till after we have eaten,” I answered. “It is not my habit to talk business in the afternoon. Why is the lawyer man so impatient, seeing that doubtless he is paid by the day?”

This was translated, and the lawyer asked how I knew his trade.

“In the same way that I know a weasel by its face and a stink-cat by its smell,” I replied, for every minute I hated that advocate more.

At this answer the lawyer grew white with anger, and the young lord burst into a roar of laughter, for, as I have said, these English people have no manners. However, they settled themselves down again on the yellow-wood bench and looked at me; while I, folding my hands, sat opposite, and looked at them for somewhere about another hour, as the interpreter told them that if they moved I should be offended, and, for my

64

SWALLOW

part, I was determined that I would not speak to them of their business until Suzanne had gone to bed.

At last, when I saw that they would bear it no longer, for they were becoming very wrathful, and saying words that sounded like oaths, I called for supper and we went in and ate it. Here again I noticed the resemblance between the young man and Ralph, for he had the same tricks of eating and drinking, and I saw that when he had done his meat he turned himself a little sideways from the table, crossing his legs in a peculiar fashion just as it always had been Ralph’s habit to do.

“The two had one grandfather, or one grandmother,” I said to myself, and grew afraid at the thought.

65

SWALLOW

“Have you living with you a young Englishman named Ralph Mackenzie?”

“One named Ralph Kenzie lives with us.” “Where is he?”

“With my husband on the veldt. I do not know where.” “Can you find him?”

“No, the veldt is very wide. If you wish to see him you must wait till he comes back.”

“When will that be?”

“I am not his nurse and cannot tell; perhaps in three months, perhaps six.”

Now again they consulted, and once more went on:

“Was the boy, Ralph Mackenzie, or Kenzie, shipwrecked in the India in the year 1824?”

“Dear Lord!” I cried, affecting to lose my patience, “am I an old Kaffir wife up before the Landdrost for stealing hens that I should be cross-questioned in this fashion? Set out all your tale at once, man, and I will answer it.”

Thereon, shrugging his shoulders, the lawyer produced a paper which the interpreter translated to me. In it were written down the names of the passengers who were upon the vessel India when she sailed from a place called Bombay, and among the names those of Lord and Lady Glenthirsk and of their son, the Honourable Ralph Mackenzie, aged nine. Then followed the evidence of one or two survivors of the shipwreck, which stated that Lady Glenthirsk and her son were seen to reach the shore in safety in the boat that was launched from the sinking ship. After this came a paragraph from an English newspaper published in Capetown, dated not two years before, and head-

67

H. RIDER HAGGARD

ed “Strange Tale of the Sea,” which paragraph, with some few errors, told the story of the finding of Ralph – though how the writing man knew it I know not, unless it was through the tutor with the blue spectacles of whom I have spoken – and said that he was still living on the farm of Jan Botmar in the Transkei. This was all that was in the paper. I asked to look at it and kept it, saying in the morning that the Kaffir girl seeing it lying about the kitchen had used it to light the fire; but to this day it is with the other things in the waggon chest under my bed.

When the paper was done with, the lawyer took up the tale and told me that it was believed in England that Lord Glenthirsk had been drowned in the sea, as indeed he was, and that Lady Glenthirsk and her son perished on the shore with the other women and children, for so those sent by the English Government to search out the facts had reported. Thus it came about that after a while Lord Glenthirsk’s younger brother was admitted by law to his title and estates, which he enjoyed for some eight years, that is, until his death. About a year before he died, however, someone sent him the paragraph headed “Strange Tale of the Sea,” and he was much disturbed by it, though to himself he argued that it was nothing but an idle story, such as it seems are often put into newspapers. The end of the matter was that he took no steps to discover whether the tale were true or false, and none knew of it save himself, and he was not minded to go fishing in that ugly water. So it came about that he kept silent as the grave, till at length, when the grave yawned at his feet, and when the rank and the lands and the wealth were of no more use to him, he opened his mouth

68

SWALLOW

to his son and to his lawyer, the two men who sat before me, and to them only, bidding them seek out the beginning of the tale, and if it were true, to make restitution to his nephew.

Now – for all this, listening with my ears wide open, and sometimes filling in what was not told me in words, I gathered from the men before they left the house – as it chanced the dying lord could not have chosen two worse people for such an errand, seeing that although the son was honest, both of them were interested in proving the tale to be false. Since that time, however, often I have thought that he knew this himself, and trusted by the choice both to cheat his own conscience and to preserve the wealth and dignity for his son. God, to whom he has gone, alone knows the truth of it, but with such a man it may very well have been as I think. I say that both were interested, for it seems, as he told me afterwards, that the lawyer was to receive a great sum – ten thousand pounds – under the will of the dead lord for whom he had done much during his lifetime. But if Ralph were proved to be the heir this sum would have been his and not the lawyer’s, for the money was part of his father’s inheritance; therefore it was worth just ten thousand pounds to that lawyer to convince himself and the false lord that Ralph was not the man, and therefore it was that I found him so easy to deal with.

Now after his father was dead the lawyer tried to persuade the son to take no notice of his dying words, and to let the matter rest where it was, seeing that he had nothing to gain and much to lose. But this he would not consent to, for, as I have said, he was honest, declaring that he could not be easy in his mind till he knew the truth, and that if he did not go to find

69

H. RIDER HAGGARD

it out himself he would send others to do so for him. As the lawyer desired this least of anything, he gave way, and they set out upon their journey – which in those days was a very great journey indeed – arriving at last in safety at our stead in the Transkei; for, whether he liked it or not, his companion – who now was called Lord Glenthirsk – would not be turned aside from the search or suffer him to prosecute it alone.

At length, when all the tale was told, the lawyer looked at me with his sharp eyes and said, through the interpreter:

“Vrouw Botmar, you have heard the story, tell us what you know. Is the young man who lives with you he whom we seek?”

Now I thought for a second, though that second seemed like a year. All doubt had left me, there was no room for it. Ralph and no other was the man, and on my answer might hang his future. But I had argued the thing out before and made up my mind to lie, though, so far as I know, it is the only lie I ever told, and I am not a woman who often changes her mind. Therefore I lied.

“It is not he,” I said, “though for his sake I might wish that it were, and this I can prove to you.”

Now, when I had told this great falsehood, prompted to it by my love for the lad and my love for Suzanne, his affianced wife, my mind grew as it were empty for a moment, and I remember that in the emptiness I seemed to hear a sound of laughter echoing in the air somewhere above the roof of the house. Very swiftly I recovered myself, and looking at the men I saw that my words rejoiced them, except the interpreter indeed, who being a paid servant coming from far away, from the

70