Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases | Page 4

old lady. "His beard is as black
as--"
"A carrion-crow," added Katje promptly.
"Quite," agreed the Vrouw Grobelaar, with a perfect unconsciousness
of the unsavoriness of the suggestion.
"And he walks like a duck with sore feet," went on Katje. "He is as
graceful as a trek-ox, and his conversational talents are those of a
donkey in long grass."
"All that is a young girl's nonsense," observed the old lady. "I was like
that once myself. But when one grows a little older and fatter, and there
is less about one to take a man's eye,--a fickle thing, Katje, a fickle
thing,-- one looks for more in a husband than a light foot and a smart
figure."
Katje was a trifle abashed, for all the daughters of her house, were they
never so slender, grew tubby in their twenties.
"Besides," continued the worthy Vrouw, "your talk is chaff from a mill.
It must come out to leave the meal clean. Perhaps, after all, Fanie is the
man to carry you off. I think you would not take so much trouble to
worry him if you thought nothing of him."
The Vrouw Grobelaar had never heard of Beatrice and her Benedick,

but she had a notion of the principle.
"I hate him," cried Katje with singular violence.
"I think not," replied the old lady. "Sometimes the thing we want is at
our elbows, and we cannot grasp it because we reach too far. Did I ever
tell you how Stoffel Struben nearly went mad for love of his wife?"
"No," said Katje, unwillingly interested. "He was something of a fool to
begin with," commenced the Vrouw Grobelaar. "He chose his wife for
a certain quality of gentleness she had, and though I will not deny she
made him a good wife and a patient, still gentleness will not boil a pot.
He was a fine fellow to look at; big and upstanding, with plenty of
blood in him, and a grand mat of black hair on top. He moved like a
buck; so ready on his feet and so lively in all his movements. He might
have carried you off, Katje, and done you no good in the end.
"He was happy with his pretty wife for a while, and might have been
happy all his life and died blessedly had he but been able to keep from
conjuring up faces in his mind and falling in love with them. Greta, his
wife, had hair like golden wheat, so smooth and rippled with light; and
no sooner had he stroked his fill of it than he conceived nut- brown to
be the most lovely color of woman's hair. Her eyes were blue, and for
half a year he loved them; then hazel seemed to him a better sort. I said
he was a fool, didn't I?
"So his marriage to Greta became a chain instead of a union, while the
poor lass fretted her heart out over his dark looks and short answers. He
was shallow, Katje, shallow; he had the mere capacity for love, but it
was a short way to the bottom of it. You will see by and by that the
men who deserve least always want most. Stoffel had no right to a
woman at all; when he had one, and she a good girl, he let his eyes rove
for others.
"So he went about his farm with his mind straying and his heart abroad.
If you spoke to him, he paused awhile, and then looked at you with a
start as though freshly waked. He saw nothing as he went, neither his
wife with the questions in her eyes that she shamed to say with her lips,

nor the child that crowed at him from her arms. He was deaf and blind
to the healthy world, to all save the silly dreams his poisoned soul fed
on.
"Well, wicked or not, it is at least unsafe not to look where one is going.
This was a thing Stoffel never did: since he overlooked his wife, it was
not to be expected he would see a strand of fencing-wire on the ground.
So he rode on to it, and down came his horse. Down came Stoffel too,
and there was a stone handy on the place where his head lit to let some
of the moonshine out of him. He saw a heavenful of stars for a moment,
and then saw nothing for a long time. Save--one strange thing!
"When life came back to him he was in his bed very sore and empty,
and very mightily surprised to see himself alive, after all. He was
exceedingly weak and somewhat misty as to how it all had happened.
But one thing he seemed to remember--more than seemed, so