the truth struck me in all its terror: I was blind.
“I shrieked and blasphemed as I staggered about. I found my gun and tried to shoot myself, but the lightning had twisted it as you might twist a handful of straw. The Bushmen led me down to the homestead.
“Afterwards, I spent many days and nights in hell, but the day arrived when my pride lay broken in the dust, and I came to acknowledge that God’s Angel was sitting on that thundercloud, charged to save my soul.”
That night I lay long awake, thinking of old Sard’s tale. I had a very clear recollection of the inscribed stone and its surroundings, so tried to picture the tremendous episode of forty years back. The sultry summer day; the white thundercloud curdling into shape upon the hot north-western horizon and towering into the ether, until its spreading tentacles seemed to seize the world in a mighty grip. Later, the low muttering of thunder, pulsing from the monster’s baleful heart, and the thin streak of fire darting out far in advance of the rain and igniting the dry grass. Then the blasphemous jest of the strong man proud of his skill. Lastly, the thunderbolt winged to smite but not to slay, touching not so much as a hair of the head of the defiant human atom, but crushing the gun in his hand as though it were a reed, and filling his eyes with such excess of light that nothing less vivid could stir their sense for evermore.
Chapter Three.
Tommy’s Evil Genius.
“Greater love hath no man than this.”—S. John XV. 13.
His name was Danster. His age might have been anything between fifteen and forty-five. His cheekbones were high, and his eyes oblique like those of a Mongolian. Scattered unevenly over his bullet-shaped skull were thin tufts of wool, each culminating in a minute, solid pellet. His only clothing was a noisome sheep-skin kaross which had formerly belonged to a great-grandfather—long since deceased.
Danster was a Hottentot—or rather what is called by that indefinite term at the Cape. In his much-mixed blood that of the Bushman evidently preponderated. An anthropologist would have valued his skull, which seemed to epitomise the results of a criminal ancestry extending through many generations.
Tommy, surnamed Winwood, was very different. He was a blonde, blue-eyed, yellow-haired lad of eight years of age, somewhat slight and undersized, but agile and capable of endurance when under the stimulus of excitement. Five children had nested in the Winwood nursery, but only Tommy survived. The others had all succumbed to congenital delicacy before reaching the age of seven. With Tommy the Winwoods had come to South Africa in the early eighties, and had taken a farm near the coast in one of the eastern districts of the Cape Colony. Mr. Winwood was a nervous, retiring man of literary tastes. Having enough money to live upon, his farming was hardly a serious pursuit. In fact he left the management of the place almost solely in the hands of a somewhat dour but conscientious Boer, who managed to run the concern at a profit.
Mrs. Winwood suffered from extreme delicacy. She was an accomplished musician, but the climate had sapped her energy to such an extent that when the weather was warm she hardly ever touched the piano. When the days were cool, she often played for six or seven hours a day, and thus seriously overtaxed her strength. Both she and her husband were moody and morbid. Although much attached to each other, their life was a series of misunderstandings.
It may be imagined what a lonely life poor Tommy led. He received three hours’ instruction every day—two from his father and one from his mother. His nursery was full of toys, but the very number and variety of these had rendered them valueless as a resource. The homestead stood on the steep south slope of a valley through which a stream ran between fringes of timber rooted in rich, fern-bearing soil, and commanded a grand view of interspersed forest and grassy slopes. But, unfortunately, snakes abounded, so poor Tommy was restricted to the cleared area immediately surrounding the house. So his face took on that expression of pathos which haunts the looks of children debarred from the companionship of their kind.
When the tempter appeared Tommy fell an easy prey. Danster was a calf-herd. He, too, felt lonely. His avocations kept him in the vicinity of the homestead, so he soon found an opportunity of making friends with the lonely child. The intimacy grew, unnoticed by Tommy’s parents, and was for some time tacitly acquiesced in. However, one day Mrs. Winwood came upon the two sitting behind the big water-tank, and found Danster engaged in extracting the eyes of a living bird with a mimosa thorn, while Tommy looked on, fascinated. Danster was thereupon severely flogged by the overseer, under Mr. Winwood’s supervision, and earnestly warned never to show his ill-favoured face near the homestead again.
Tommy was a thoroughly truthful child. When questioned he freely admitted that the removal of the bird’s eyes was the last of a long series of hideous vivisectional experiments at which he had assisted, and which had been organised for his delectation. Like most highly-strung people, Mr. and Mrs. Winwood were morbidly sensitive to physical suffering, either in themselves or in other sentient beings. The keenness of their distress may therefore be imagined. Horrible though the thing was, they took far too serious a view of it. In fact, they imagined that their child’s character had been irreparably ruined.
Tommy had not realised how attached he was to the disreputable Danster until after the separation. One night, about a week after the dreadful discovery, Tommy confessed to his mother that he loved Danster very much indeed. Soon he began to mope visibly. His father and mother were horribly annoyed at the turn things had taken. They always referred to Danster as their son’s evil genius.
Something had to be done, so it was decided to employ a governess. In due course a highly certificated lady came to undertake the regeneration of Tommy’s morals as well as the development of his mind. She had much erudition, but little sympathy, so Tommy and she were antipathetic towards each other from the very start, and the starved heart of the lonely child went out more and more towards the banished Danster.
Drought had lain heavily on the land for many months. The season was autumn. During early spring copious rains had fallen, but throughout sultry January and blistering February the heavens had been as brass and the wind as the blast from a furnace. The grass which had sprung up rank and luxuriant withered again, and now the farm, which was much under-stocked, lay like a clay potsherd covered with tinder.
One afternoon the sun smote the earth with more than usual fury. Away to the westward irregular fragments of thundercloud, which seemed incapable of cohering sufficiently to produce a storm, coquetted with the quivering mountain-tops. Ever and anon irregular gusts from the eastward would trail over glowing hill and gasping vale with a sound as though the tortured earth were sobbing an appeal to the skies for the withheld mercy of rain. It was one of those days on which the beast seeks, gasping, for a cool lair, and the bird pants with half outstretched wings, deep in the densest foliage.
Mr. and Mrs. Winwood had collapsed completely; the governess retired to her darkened room; the servants had disappeared. Tommy only was awake. He tried all sorts of devices for passing the time, but the walls of his comparatively cool room became an irksome prison as the afternoon wore on; so he opened the glass door quietly, to avoid wakening his father in the next room, and stepped quietly on to the back stoep. Here he was in the shade. The air had taken on that suspicion of coolness which, in seasons of drought, nearly always tempers the afternoon.
Tommy leant upon the verandah rail, and the wind, as it stirred his yellow locks, seemed to be charged with some odour that stimulated his languid pulses. He sniffed at it wonderingly; what did it remind him of? Then he suddenly knew, and his cheek crimsoned with a guilty flush: it was the smell of Danster’s kaross, its grosser elements subdued by distance,
