Читать книгу Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases: Seventeen Short Stories - Gibbon Perceval - Страница 9

THE horizon to the west was keen as the blade of a knife, and over it all the colors swam and blended in an ecstasy of sunset.

"There is more blood than peace in a sky like that," observed the Vrouw Grobelaar from her armchair on the stoop. "When I was a child, I never saw a mess of fire in the west but I thought it betokened the end of the world. Ah, well, one grows wiser!"

"Green is for love," said Katje. "Do you see any green in the sunset?" I saw a mile of it edging on a sea of orange and a mountain of azure.

"Where?" demanded the old lady. "Oh, that—that's almost blue, which means sin in marriage. But naming the colors in the sky is a wasteful foolishness, and the folk that are guided by them always tumble in the end. When Jan Uys was on his death-bed, he said Dia had always been counting the colors with the Irishman, and that's what caused all the trouble."

Katje sighed.

"He was a man of sixty," the unconscious Vrouw continued, "and a Boer of the best, with a farm below the Hangklip, where my cousin Barend's aunt is now. He was a rich and righteous man, too, and as upstanding and strong as any man of his age that I ever saw. He had buried four good wives, so nobody can say he wasn't a good husband, but he had a way with him—something heavy and ugly, like a beast or a Kafir—which many girls didn't like. His fifth wife was Dia, who came from Lord knows where, somewhere down south, and she was only sixteen.

"I believe in fitting a girl with a husband when she is ripe, and sixteen is old enough with any well-grown maid. But in the case of Dia, it is a pity somebody did not stop to think. She was more than half a child; just a slender, laughing, running thing that liked sweets and peaches better than coffee and meat, and used to throw stones. She threw one at my cart, with her arm low like a boy, and hit my Kafir on the neck, and then squeaked and ran to hide among the kraals. Yes, somebody should have stopped to think before they coupled her to big Jan Uys, with his scowl and his red eyes and white beard, and his sixty hard years behind him."

"I should think so, indeed," was Katje's comment.

"What you think is of no importance," retorted the old lady sharply. "I think so, and that settles it. Well, it did not take long for Dia to lose all the froth and foolishness that were in her. The child that was more than half of her nature was simply trampled to death, for Jan Uys had a short way of shaping his women-folk. She used to cry, they say, but never dared to rebel, which I can understand, knowing the man and the way he had of giving an order as though it were impossible for any one to disobey him. In particular, she could not learn to make cheese, and spoilt enough milk to feed a dorp on.

"'Very well,' he said, 'if you cannot make the cheese the Kafir woman shall do it. And you shall do her work at the churn-handle. I want no idlers in my house.'