Swallow | Page 7

what is more, when my man dies I shall
not be long behind him. Ah! they may talk, all these wise young people;
but, after all, what is there better for a woman than to love some man,
the good and the bad of him together, to bear his children and to share
his sorrows, and to try to make him a little better and a little less selfish
and unfortunate than he would have been alone? Poor men! Without us
women their lot would be hard indeed, and how they will get on in
heaven, where they are not allowed to marry, is more than I can guess.
So we married, and within a year our daughter was born and christened
by the family name of Suzanne after me, though almost from her cradle
the Kaffirs called her "Swallow," I am not sure why. She was a very
beautiful child from the first, and she was the only one, for I was ill at
her birth and never had any more children. The other women with their
coveys of eight and ten and twelve used to condole with me about this,
and get a sharp answer for their pains. I had one which always shut
their mouths, but I won't ask the girl here to set it down. An only
daughter was enough for me, I said, and if it wasn't I shouldn't have
told them so, for the truth is that it is best to take these things as we find
them, and whether it be one or ten, to declare that that is just as we

would wish it. I know that when we were on the great trek and I saw
the /kinderchies/ of others dying of starvation, or massacred in dozens
by the Kaffir devils, ah! then I was glad that we had no more children.
Heartaches enough my ewe lamb Suzanne gave me during those bitter
years when she was lost. And when she died, having lived out her life
just before her husband, Ralph Kenzie, went on commando with his
son to the Zulu war, whither her death drove him, ah! then it ached for
the last time. When next my heart aches it shall be with joy to find
them both in Heaven.
CHAPTER II
HOW SUZANNE FOUND RALPH KENZIE
Our farm where we lived in the Transkei was not very far from the
ocean; indeed, any one seated in the /kopje/ or little hill at the back of
the house, from the very top of which bubbles a spring of fresh water,
can see the great rollers striking the straight cliffs of the shore and
spouting into the air in clouds of white foam. Even in warm weather
they spout thus, but when the south-easterly gales blow then the sight
and the sound of them are terrible as they rush in from the black water
one after another for days and nights together. Then the cliffs shiver
beneath their blows, and the spray flies up as though it were driven
from the nostrils of a thousand whales, and is swept inland in clouds,
turning the grass and the leaves of the trees black in its breath. Woe to
the ship that is caught in those breakers and ground against those rocks,
for soon nothing is left of it save scattered timbers shivered as though
by lightning.
One winter--it was when Suzanne was seven years old--such a
south-east gale as this blew for four days, and on a certain evening after
the wind had fallen, having finished my household work, I went to the
top of the /kopje/ to rest and look at the sea, which was still raging
terrible, taking with me Suzanne. I had been sitting there ten minutes or
more when Jan, my husband, joined me, and I wondered why he had
come, for he, as brave a man as ever lived in all other things, was
greatly afraid of the sea, and, indeed, of any water. So afraid was he

that he did not like the sight of it in its anger, and would wake at nights
at the sound of a storm--yes, he whom I have seen sleep through the
trumpetings of frightened elephants and the shouting of a Zulu impi.
"You think that sight fine, wife," he said, pointing to the spouting foam;
"but I call it the ugliest in the world. Almighty! it turns my blood cold
to look at it and to think that Christian men, ay, and women and
children too, may be pounding to pulp in those breakers."
"Without doubt the death is as good as another," I answered; "not that I
would choose it, for I wish to die in my bed with the /predicant/ saying
prayers over me, and my husband weeping--or