Blue Aloes | Page 7

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 it into a garden, and make it blossom like the rose--shall we?"
"Yes, yes!" he cried eagerly. "'Blossom like the rose'--that comes out of the Bible! I have heard daddy read it. But we must not talk about it to mamma. It makes her too sad to come here, or even talk about it. Mamma doesn't like sad things."
Suddenly, the strange quietude of the place was invaded by the sound of voices. They were far-off voices, but both the girl and the child started as though caught in some forbidden act, and instinctively took hands. A moment later they were hurrying away from the lonely spot, back