The Ghost Kings | Page 2

sky, so dense and thick that its rays were cut off from the
earth which lay below silent and stifled. Tom, the Kaffir driver, had

told her that a storm was coming, a father of storms, which would end
the great drought. Therefore he had gone to a kloof in the mountains
where the oxen were in charge of the other two native boys--since on
this upland there was no pasturage to drive them back to the waggon.
For, as he explained to her, in such tempests cattle are apt to take fright
and rush away for miles, and without cattle their plight would be even
worse than it was at present.
At least this was what Tom said, but Rachel, who had been brought up
among natives and understood their mind, knew that his real reason
was that he wished to be out of the way when the baby was buried.
Kaffirs do not like death, unless it comes by the assegai in war, and
Tom, a good creature, had been fond of that baby during its short little
life. Well, it was buried now; he had finished digging its resting-place
in the hard soil before he went. Rachel, poor child, for she was but
fifteen, had borne it to its last bed, and her father had unpacked his
surplice from a box, put it on and read the Burial Service over the grave.
Afterwards together they had filled in that dry, red earth, and rolled
stones on to it, and as there were few flowers at this season of the year,
placed a shrivelled branch or two of mimosa upon the stones--the best
offering they had to make.
Rachel and her father were the sole mourners at this funeral, if we may
omit two rock rabbits that sat upon a shelf of stone in a neighbouring
cliff, and an old baboon which peered at these strange proceedings
from its crest, and finally pushed down a boulder before it departed,
barking indignantly. Her mother could not come because she was ill
with grief and fever in a little tent by the waggon. When it was all over
they returned to her, and there had been a painful scene.
Mrs. Dove was lying on a bed made of the cartel, or frame strung with
strips of green hide, which had been removed from the waggon, a
pretty, pale-faced woman with a profusion of fair hair. Rachel always
remembered that scene. The hot tent with its flaps turned up to let in
whatever air there might be. Her mother in a blue dressing-gown, dingy
with wear and travel, from which one of the ribbon bows hung by a
thread, her face turned to the canvas and weeping silently. The gaunt

form of her father with his fanatical, saint-like face, pale beneath its tan,
his high forehead over which fell one grizzled lock, his thin, set lips
and far-away grey eyes, taking off his surplice and folding it up with
quick movements of his nervous hands, and herself, a scared,
wondering child, watching them both and longing to slip away to
indulge her grief in solitude. It seemed an age before that surplice was
folded, pushed into a linen bag which in their old home used to hold
dirty clothes, and finally stowed away in a deal box with a broken
hinge. At length it was done, and her father straightened himself with a
sigh, and said in a voice that tried to be cheerful:
"Do not weep, Janey. Remember this is all for the best. The Lord hath
taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord."
Her mother sat up looking at him reproachfully with her blue eyes, and
answered in her soft Scotch accent:
"You said that to me before, John, when the other one went, down at
Grahamstown, and I am tired of hearing it. Don't ask me to bless the
Lord when He takes my babes, no, nor any mother, He Who could
spare them if He chose. Why should the Lord give me fever so that I
could not nurse it, and make a snake bite the cow so that it died? If the
Lord's ways are such, then those of the savages are more merciful."
"Janey, Janey, do not blaspheme," her father had exclaimed. "You
should rejoice that the child is in Heaven."
"Then do you rejoice and leave me to grieve. From to-day I only make
one prayer, that I may never have another. John," she added with a
sudden outburst, "it is your fault. You know well I told you how it
would be. I told you that if you would come this mad journey the babe
would die, aye, and I tell you"--here her voice sank to a kind of wailing
whisper--"before the tale