Blue Aloes | Page 2

there was--nothing! Darkness stood without like a presence, and
seemed to push against the shutters, trying to enter as she hastily
rebarred them.
Something was stirring in the room, too. With hands that shook, she lit
the candle and, by its gleam, discovered Roderick, the eldest child,
sitting up in bed, his red-gold mop all tumbled, his eyes, full of dreams,
fixed on her with a wide stare. She crossed the room, and knelt beside
him.
"What is it, darling?"
"I thought my nannie was there," he murmured.
"Your nannie?" she echoed, in surprise, knowing that "nannie" was the
common name for any black nurse who tended and waited on them.

"But she is in bed and asleep long ago."
"I don't mean that one. I mean my nannie what's dead--Sophy."
The girl's backbone grew chill. She remembered hearing that the
children had been always minded by an educated old Basuto woman
called Sophy, who had been a devoted slave to each from birth up, and
because of whose death, a few months back, a series of English
governesses had come and gone at the farm.
She remembered, too, those fluty whispers that resembled no human
voice.
"Lie down, darling, and sleep," she said gently. "I will stay by you."
The boy did not instantly obey. He had a whim to sit up, watching.
There was no fear in his wide grey eyes, but it was uncanny to see them
searching the shadows of the room and returning always, with a fixed,
somnambulistic stare, to the window. Christine had a fancy that
children, with the memories of another world clinging to them, have a
vision of unseen things denied to older people; and she wondered
painfully what was going on in the mind behind this handsome little
face. At last, she prevailed upon him to lie down, but it was long before
he slept. Even then, she sat on, holding his hand, keeping vigil over
him and the two other small sleepers.
They were lovely children. Each head glowed red-gold upon its pillow,
and each little profile was of a regularity almost classical, with the pure
colouring peculiar to red-haired people. The boy's face was well
sprinkled with freckles, but five-year-old Marguerite and little Coral, of
four, who were perfect little imps of mischief, had the dainty
snow-pink look of daisies growing in a meadow with their faces turned
up to God.
It was difficult to connect such fragrant, well-tended flowers with the
whistling horror out in the darkness. More, it was absurd, impossible.
The girl decided that the whole thing was a bad nightmare which she
must shake off. The explanation of it could only be that, half asleep,

she had dreamed she heard the tapping and the whispers, and smelled
the evil odour. Why should a Thing come and tell her to mind the
children? "Mind the boy." He was already minded--they were all happy
and well cared for in their own home. The boy Roderick must have
been dreaming, too, and talking in his sleep. Thus, Christine's clear
English mind rejected the whole thing as an illusion, resulting from
weariness and the new, strange conditions of her life. Yet there was an
Irish side to her that could not so easily dispose of the matter. She
remembered with what uneasiness her nights had been haunted from
the first. How always, when the dark fell, she had sensed something
uncanny, something unseen and menacing, that she could never track to
its source. But tonight the sense of hovering evil had taken definite
form and direction. It was at the children that harm was directed; the
whistling, sighing words had concerned the children only. The girl
shivered again at the horrid recollection.
"Yet anything that cares about children cannot be altogether evil," she
thought. That comforted her a little, but the spell of horror the night had
laid upon her was not lifted until dawn came. Then she slipped on some
clothes and let herself out into the morning air.
The garden that straggled about the farm was composed of a dozen
century-old oaks, a sprinkling of feathery pepper-trees, and many
clumps of brilliant-blossomed cacti. The veranda and outbuildings were
heavily hung with creepers, and great barrels of begonias and
geraniums stood about. Within a few hundred yards of the house, the
green and glowing cultivation stopped as abruptly as the edges of an
oasis in the desert, and the Karoo began--that sweeping, high table-land,
empty of all but brown stones, long white thorns, fantastically shaped
clumps of prickly-pear, bare brown hills, and dried-up rivulets, and that
yet is one of the healthiest and, from the farmer's point of view,
wealthiest plateaux in the world.
Between the farm and the far hills arose a curious line of shroudy blue,
seeming to