Blue Aloes | Page 7

the stomachs of the
cattle, who love too much its watery leaves. Mr. van Cannan was one
of the farmers rich enough to take drastic steps to save his farm. Saltire
was doing it for him very thoroughly and efficiently.
"How much longer do you expect to be?" asked van Cannan.
"Oh, another three weeks ought to finish the job," said Saltire. "But, as
you know, they are most persistent things. When you think they are
done for, you find them sprouting green again below the wound, and
have to give them another dose."
"Three weeks!" muttered van Cannan, with moody eyes. He looked to
Christine like a man suffering with sickness of the soul. Everyone

supposed the rest-cure definitely settled on, but, with the contrariness
of an ailing child, he suddenly announced determinedly, "I shall leave
for East London this afternoon."
The children were called to kiss him good-bye, and they clustered
round him.
"Take care of them for me," he said, with a piercing wistfulness, to
Christine. "Take care of my boy."
Then he turned brusquely to Saxby, making arrangements for a
mule-cart to be ready at two o'clock to drive him into Cradock, the
nearest large town, where he would have to spend the night before
proceeding farther by rail.
Christine could not but be struck by the words he had used, and mused
over them wonderingly while she tucked Rita and Coral under their
mosquito-curtains. It was her habit to spend this hour with Roddy and a
story-book. But today he hovered restlessly, showing no inclination to
settle down, and seeming full of some suppressed excitement. At last,
he whispered in her ear:
"Don't forget where you said you would come with me--to see Carol
and the others." Christine wondered if old Sophy was one of the others,
and, even in the noontide heat, she felt a chill.
"All right, Roddy," she agreed slowly. "Wait till I get a sunshade,
though. It is dreadfully hot."
She shaded him as much as herself while they threaded their way
through the shrubs that seemed to simmer in the grey-brown heat.
Almost every South African farm has its private cemetery. It is the
custom to bury the dead where they have lived, and often the graveyard
is in the shadiest corner of the garden, where the women sit to sew, the
men bring their pipes, and children spread their playthings upon the flat,
roughly hewn tombstones.

At Blue Aloes, the place of the dead was hidden far from the haunts of
the living, but the narrow, uncertain path led to it at last--a bare,
sun-bleached spot, secluded but unshaded by a gaudy-blossomed hedge
of cactus. A straight, single line of graves, less than a dozen in number,
lay blistering in the sunshine. Some were marked with slabs of
lime-worn [Transcriber's note: time-worn?] stone, upon whose faded
lettering little green rock-lizards were disporting themselves. The last
two in the line had white marble crosses at their heads, each bearing a
name in black letters, and a date. The preceding one, too, was fairly
new, with the earth heaped in still unbroken lumps upon it, but it bore
no distinguishing mark of any kind. Death appeared to have been fairly
busy in recent times at Blue Aloes. The date on the end grave was no
older than six months.
Little Bernard Quentin van Cannan lay there, sleeping too soon at the
age of three and a half. Roddy pronounced his brief but sufficiently
eloquent epitaph.
"He was Coral's twin. A tarantula bit him--one of the awful big
poisonous ones out of the aloe hedge."
The next cross registered the resting-place of Carol Quentin van
Cannan--drowned a year back, at the age of nine. Christine's sad gaze
travelled to the third and unmarked mound.
"Is that Sophy's grave?" she asked softly, for shrivelling on the lumps
of earth lay a bunch of poppies that she had seen Roddy gathering the
day before, and now remembered wondering where he had disappeared
to afterward. Roddy did not answer. He was staring before him with
manful eyes that winked rapidly but shed no tears. His lips were pursed
up as if to whistle, yet made no sound. At the sight of him and the
withered poppies in the place where never a flower of memory
blossomed, hot tears surged to the girl's eyes. It was wistful to think of
a child remembering when all others forgot.
"No one ever comes here but me," he said, at last.
Christine got rid of her tears by turning her back on him and pressing

them away with her fingers, for she knew that emotion embarrasses and
pains children, and she wanted to help this small, brave man, not hurt
him.
"You and I will come here often, Roddy. We will turn