Part 17

One of the many curls which she had severed so ruthlessly had fallen into the bosom of her dress, and Charlotte now held it in her hand and turned toward Hauer, who had been watching the sacrifice with much emotion.

"Will you accept this?" she asked timidly, "I--it is all I have to give. If you would care to have it----"

The young man took it tenderly from her and raised it to his lips.

"I shall hold it dearer than all else in the world," he said; "this lock of your beautiful hair."

"Is it beautiful? I used to be very vain of my hair once." She smiled. "If you will keep it," she continued, "and perhaps look at it sometimes, and, when you do, recall the memory of one to whom you were kind--of one who will never forget--who will offer prayers for your welfare and your happiness at the very throne of God----" She brushed away a tear that had crept out unseen upon her cheek, and for the moment her voice failed her.

Sanson moved forward silently and seized her wrist with one hand, while with the other he shook out the short coil of cord which he held.

The blood flamed in Charlotte's cheek, and she shrank back suddenly, dreading some fresh indignity.

"Ah, no!" she exclaimed passionately. "I beg of you! Not that again! I promise you, I will be good!" she reiterated, standing with her hands behind her, like some frightened child expecting punishment, "I will keep still! I will do whatever you tell me. I will not move. Oh, let me be free, for this last hour of my life!"

Hauer approached the executioner. "Surely she has suffered enough already," he said. "Look at her wrists." For the severity of her former bondage had left cruel marks upon the white skin of her delicate arms.

Sanson spoke for the first time. His voice was low and had a tone of refinement which perhaps reassured his listeners.

"You need not be afraid," he said. "I am not rough. I will not hurt you. It is for the best."

Charlotte looked up into his face and, reading there nothing but the desire of a blunt but honest man to discharge an unpleasant duty with as little pain as possible to all concerned, submitted without further entreaty.

"As you will," she said, holding out her hands to him. He laid one small wrist across the other and with a few quick turns of the rope tied her hands behind her back, fastening them securely but without unnecessary severity.

As he opened the cell-door, a loud tumult rose from the street below. Charlotte drew back in terror.

"What sound is that?" she asked trembling.

"'Tis but the crowd growing impatient. Do not be frightened," said Sanson in a reassuring voice. "You are safe enough with me."

Hauer stepped forward. "I will accompany you," he said, in a determined tone.

"No, no!" entreated the girl. "Please not. 'Farewell' is always a hard word to say. I shall want all my courage on the scaffold." She moved towards the door, then turned again to the artist. "One last request I have to make," she said. "That you will send the portrait to my old father at Argentan. It will comfort his heart, perhaps," she added, "and help him to forgive me for disposing of my life without his permission."

"Now," she continued, "let us say goodby."

With an effort Hauer restrained his tears. He fell on one knee at her feet, as though to kiss her hands once more. But she shook her head sadly, unable to lift them, bound as they were, to his lips. "Ah, no," she said, "you see, it is no longer allowed!"

Hauer raised the edge of her red smock and kissed it passionately. "I kiss the tips of your wings!" he said.

Charlotte turned to the executioner, who was waiting somewhat impatiently at the door. "I am ready," she said. Then, as her eye fell upon the lonely kneeling figure of her lover, "Farewell," she added. "Farewell, for the last time. God bless you for all that you have been to me. You will not forget me, I know. And I shall carry with me the memory of your friendship to the end. Be happy in the knowledge that I am glad to die for France; and remember that it is guilt alone that brings disgrace, and not the scaffold!"

With a resolute step she walked through the open door and out into the tumult of the street.

An hour later, when the warder, Richard, entered the cell, he found the young artist still on his knees, convulsive sobs shaking his whole body, while tears of anguish rained down his cheeks and fell unheeded upon a long lock of hair which he was holding tenderly in his hands and which he now and again raised to his lips.

With a grunt, half scorn, half sympathy, the old warder shook his head and, closing the door quickly behind him, stole away in search of the more cheerful society of his wife and little Jean.

THE BURIED ANCHOR

BY

PERCEVAL GIBBON

There was a tale that Oom Piet used to tell, of the days when he showed his back to the tax-gatherers, and trekked east to the very edge of the world, where the veld broke into patches of sand and shelved down into the sea. It was the only one of all his stories that did not make him out a hero; the rest were all of war with the kafirs and hunting in new-found lands, where the game was so thick that it jostled for pasture. But this was a tale of wonder, and he wondered over it contentedly till he went to that place where all riddles are answered.

It began always with the long Odyssey of the trek, while the slow wagons drew indomitably to ever fresh horizons and each dawn showed a new country and the fresh spoor of buck. Then there were the mountains, seen afar for days, that stood across his track; he had searched them north and south for more than a month ere he found the winding thread of valley that let him through. Not once but a dozen times in that year-long journey his ripe craft of war had served him well, and the wagons had been laagered in time to stand off an attack of kafirs; each lonely battle was fresh in his memory, and he never omitted to tell how his wife crouched beside him as he fought, loading his spare rifle and passing it into his hand. Sometimes, at this stage in the history, some of his old force would return to him, and one could see all the face harden and grow keen behind the big beard. Oom Piet was very old and much under the dominion of his years; for him one thing in a story was as much as another; and he always carried us through every stage of that trek, from the Bushmen he shot in the mountains to the baby he buried at Weenen Drift.[12]

And thus at last, when they had passed through an easy country, where Zulu satraps from the north ruled the terror-stricken kraals, and nothing any longer had the power to make him wonder, they came upon the sea. It was a still evening when they drew down to its shore, and before them the unimagined ocean filled the world and lay against the sky, and its murmur hushed the long-familiar noises of the veld. A broken reef of rock stood a hundred yards from the beach and the water creamed about it; the crags were like gapped and broken teeth. Oom Piet stood with his wife's hand on his arm and his three sons at his elbow, and all five gazed awhile in silence. The spell of the stillness and the great space worked within them all.

"It is a place of peace, at all events," said Oom Piet, at last.

The hand on his arm tightened. Susanna looked up at him with a smile.

"But I am glad I am not alone here," she answered.

As for the lads, theirs was a bewilderment that stilled their judgment. Klein Piet, the eldest, leaned on his rifle and stared out at the sea with empty eyes, for it spoke to unguessed depths in his soul; and Jan and Andries were both a little afraid. They had nothing to say, and when presently Piet led the way back to the wagons, they followed him hesitating, casting nervous glances over their shoulders as they went. Even by the fires, as they sat together over their evening meal, some constraint remained with them, so that they talked with an effort of trivial things while their thoughts abode elsewhere, and Susanna looked from one to another with a little frown of perplexity. Not one of them could have told what troubled him, or guessed that in his very name of Van Praagh there closed a long tradition of the salt and sound of the sea.

It was when a new dawn had shown them the place in clear light, unwitched by evening shadows and calm, that Piet made his decision. Landward of the sand the veld was rich, with patches of bush; a stream ran through it handily, and to his eyes, wise in a hundred aspects of game land, cattle land, and mealie land, it spoke of security and comfort. He was not a man to be drawn from his sure judgment by trifles of liking and curiosity; he had lived too close to the real things of life to be deluded by semblances; but none the less, there was gladness for him that all these good things, the materials of a home and a livelihood, lay at the flank of that great tame sea, to whose noise his ears were already become accustomed. There was a welcome in the sound of it; under the morning sun it showed a face as bright as a host's; and when the lads came back from the beach, with their hair blown about their faces and their hands full of shells, they found him sitting on an ant hill, in the middle of a square he had marked out with big smooth stones.

"What is it?" asked Klein Piet.

"Our house," answered his father. "We will build it here, with the stoop looking out to the water. That--" he pointed a line with his finger--"that shall be the front of it, to face the sun each day when he up-saddles. There, yonder, shall be the kraals; and we will live between the sea and the veld and have the best of both. What do you think of it?"

Andries laughed delightedly; a new thing was always a good thing for him. Jan, too, was pleased and curious; only Klein Piet looked grave, but not with any doubt or dissatisfaction.

"Well?" asked the father again. "What do you think of it, my son?"

Klein Piet answered slowly. "I think well of it," he said, meeting his father's gaze with his steady blue eyes; "so well, father, that I should have stayed in any case, even if you had turned back."

"Eh?" The elder man doubted if he heard aright.

Klein Piet seemed to be in a dream. "I only know," he said, in the same slow manner of speech, "that this place I stand on is like a birth-place to me. I must have dreamed of it when I was a child."

The younger boys were watching the pair of them in wonder. Piet put out his hand to his son.

"Then we shall not quarrel," he said. "I cannot say what it is, the finger of God stirring or the lusts of the flesh, but the same thing has hold of me, Klein Piet. I am fallen at the same dyke; I could not leave this place if I would."

Only Susanna was not completely at her ease. Piet found no matter for surprise in this, but looked to see a change when the house should be built and the offices of home-keeping should have set up landmarks in her life. A Boer woman should live between her kitchen and her bed, he was used to say, and he held to this unswervingly even when the kitchen was but the cheek of a wood-fire in the veld and the bed the windy sail of a wagon. So when her face showed that the strangeness of the place did not abate for her, when she shrank from being alone and shivered at the on-coming of the nights that strode in from the sea, he only smiled on her and was careful to be close to her, and was glad, with a mild satisfaction, that the long trek and the fights and the sorrows had left her womanly and soft. She was a De Villiers from the western edge of the Karoo, fair and still as all the women of that stock are; but it never happened to him to think of the dead men and women who had gone to the making of her family, soldiers and gospellers and martyrs, but never a sailor among them. Neither did it happen that he took any account of his kafirs, for Piet was sound Boer to the bone; or he might have seen that they, too, had their fears and misgivings. The black man's solitude is peopled with ghosts and devils; beyond the ring of his firelight, the dark is uneasy with presences; and it was not fear of the Zulus alone that kept these tremblers close about the camp, and cowed them to an anxious obedience the sjambok could never have commanded.

Indeed, there was no time for Piet and his sons to become infected with doubts, for they set to work at once on the building of their house. The stone thereabouts lay over the face of the land in rounded boulders and splintered cleanly under the sledge-hammer. The house they devised to face the sea was to be of stone from eaves to the foot of the walls and rooted well in the ground. Piet marked it all out with little gutters, and, since he himself was the strongest of them, he set the lads to dig a firm foundation with half the kafirs, while he took the other half to split and carry stone. They had all a good will to work; their task was to justify to themselves their choice of a home, and the skinny kafirs had to bend their naked backs freely to keep pace with the eager work of their masters. The thud of the picks and the ring of Piet's great hammer made a loud answer to the ceaseless murmur and rustle of the sea on the sand; even Susanna was stirred from her cares by the briskness of the work.

The place where Piet labored at the stone was under the bank of the stream, where it ran deep and slow, and curved curiously between little hard headlands of rock and easy bosoms of sand; so that when he was plying the great sledge and cutting out the stone in big, flat cakes, he was hidden from the lads who dug on the foundations of the house, a couple of hundred paces away. There was little enough to fear now, but his old lore of war still governed him, and he carried his rifle to his work with him, and had chosen to work in a spot where he could not be suddenly approached by one coming secretly through the hummocks. Here, at noon, on the fourth or fifth day of the building, he was laboring happily. His was the part to swing the great sledge on the wedges; three, four full-bodied blows, each ringing true as a bell on the iron wedges, and a fat, flat slice of stone jarred loose from the body of the rock, to be hauled apart by the kafirs; and then in with the wedges again. He had joy in his strength, and in the pretty skill of never missing the head of the wedge; so that he worked on without fatigue and did not look about him. It was when another big flake of stone was broken away, that an exclamation from one of the kafirs made him turn sharply to look up-stream.

He was never sure what manner of man he saw, watching him from the far side of the spruit. For one thing, there was sweat in his eyes; for another, he turned to grasp his rifle, and when he turned back, the man was gone. But in the couple of moments that the man was in view, Piet saw that he was white, a short, strongly-built white man, dark against the pale sand. And though he could never find a phrase for the impression in his mind, the thing that puzzled him was the utter strangeness of the man's appearance. Whether it was the fashion of his clothes, his attitude, his looks, or just the mere whole of him, he could never explain. But, "it seemed to me as if he were none of God's making," he always added.

It was a matter of no more than a couple of breaths; then his bewilderment broke up, and caution took its place. He bustled his kafirs together and shepherded them out of the streambed and back to the camp, coming last with his rifle cocked in the crook of his arm to guard against any possible danger. He saw that work had ceased in the foundations of the house; the lads and the kafirs were gathered in a knot in the pit, and their voices buzzed in talk. But he gave no notice to that.

"We are being watched," he said to them. "Back to the laager and get your guns."

And once again the square of wagons became a fort, and the little family stood to its arms against all comers, for its right to live in the place it had chosen.

Piet told them what he had seen; it was little enough, and he had no key to its meaning. Susanna, having helped to lay the spare rifles and the ammunition ready, had gone back to her fire, for pots must be watched though the veld were alive with enemies. The men, each standing on a wagon wheel, searching the country with keen eyes, turned the thing over in their minds.

"You are sure he was white, father?" asked Jan.

Piet was quite sure.

"And he had no gun?"

"No," replied Piet. "He had nothing in his hands at all."

They spoke without turning their heads or ceasing for an instant in the watch they kept.

"Then," said Klein Piet, with assurance, "it must be the English. Only the English go about without guns in a wild country, and collect taxes."

The explanation seemed reasonable to them all; they would have been less dismayed if a black foe had shown himself in force. The feeling that dragged the Boer people up by the roots and set them trekking into the unknown was no mere antipathy to taxation; it was founded on an abiding mistrust and hatred of the English who were multiplying in the land. Piet's strong face took on an added grimness as Klein Piet's explanation forced itself on him.

"But perhaps," suggested Andries, the youngest, "it is just an Englishman on trek. He would not trouble us."

That was a comfortable thought, too. Piet kept his boys on watch for another hour, but nothing showed, and then they ate quickly, and he disposed them for a search. It was all done in good order and after the approved fashion; as each moved forward, his retreat was covered by another's rifle; and between them they scoured all the broken ground within a couple of miles.

"Well," said Piet at last, when the search was over and they had not found so much as a spoor of a foot, "this is a wonderful thing."

"You are sure it was a man you saw?" asked Klein Piet, doubtfully. "The sun plays tricks with a man's eyes, sometimes."

But Piet was not to be shaken. "As sure," he said, "as I am here. But what kind of man--" he broke off, frowning. "There is nothing for it," he added, "but to go on with the work and be wary."

"Yes, the work." Klein Piet turned to him. "When you came back from the spruit, we had just found a curious thing where we were digging."

"An iron cross," put in young Andries.

"A cross?" repeated the father.

"It is not a cross," said Klein Piet, quickly. "It is--something else. Come and see it, father."

They had been talking together outside their laager, and now they went across to the great pit that the lads and the kafirs had dug to plant the house in. The digging was not yet all done, and where the morning's labor had ended, Klein Piet pointed to the thing of which he had spoken. Only a part of it was uncovered--two curving, spade-ended arms of rust-red iron, and a shaft which stuck out of the earth.

"Is that not a cross, father?" cried Andries. "See, it has arms and----"

Piet shook his head. "No, it's no cross," he answered. "How can it have come here? I remember once a man who rode on commando, an Englishman, and he had pictures of such things as this on his arms, pricked into the skin. This is an anchor, a piece of a ship."

Klein Piet, standing by his side, laughed suddenly, so short and harsh a laugh that Piet turned to him in surprise.

"I might have known," said Klein Piet. "Of course it is part of a ship. There have been ships here, once; can't you _feel_ that there have been ships hereabouts?"

At another time Piet would have shown little patience with this manner of talk; but now his mind was full of other concerns, and he let it pass.

"We must dig the thing out," he said. "It will be heavy to lift, though. Take a pair of spades and see how big it is."

Klein Piet and Jan jumped down into the pit and set to work, while Andries and Piet watched. It was no hard matter to unbury the shank of the anchor; the easy earth came away in heaping shovelfuls, and presently the whole of it lay bare, with its great wooden stock rotted to threads and its ring pitted and thin with rust. Jan leaned on his shovel and stared at it; Klein Piet knelt by it and swept away earth with his hands.

"Perhaps there was a wreck here," Piet was saying. "Some ship may have been driven up by a storm and the sea have beaten it to pieces, so that all the wooden parts floated away and this was left."

Klein Piet, on his knees, still grubbing away with his hands, laughed at him.

"No," he said. "That is not so, father. For there is a chain fast to this anchor."

He had worried a hole with his hands, and sure enough, when they came to look, there was a link of a great chain running from the anchor ring into the earth.

"Now," said Klein Piet, rising from his knees; "who will tell me what the other end of that chain is fast to?"

It was a strange thing for a house-building Boer to find; their shovels only showed them that there was a long chain there, running level perhaps six feet below the surface of the ground. They bared a couple of fathoms of it, red as gold with its long burial, and then Piet bade them halt.

"We must cut it," he said. "It will be hard work, but plainer to do than digging up the whole of it. And for to-day, let us go back to camp and leave it."

Piet was a little resentful of these things that had arrived to disturb the course of his work. First, the sudden stranger who left no spoor where he walked, and now the anchor lying where the roots of his home should be--they were beyond the calculations of an upright Boer. Like many more sophisticated men, Piet relied on his environment possessing a certain quality; when foreign elements colored it, when it was flavored with unascertained ingredients, a sort of helplessness sapped his powers; he was like a man walking blindfold. Only his bull-headed pluck served him at such times; and now, when he doubted and was uneasy, he held on without hesitation in the task he had undertaken. A _brand-wacht_ was maintained that night, the four of them taking turns to sit sentry by the great wood fire; and though, during his turn of the watch, the night seemed alive with lurking men who stared and slunk, he faced the new dawn with no leak in his courage.

That day, they set to work at cutting through the great chain that was fast to the anchor ring. Their equipment for such a purpose was poor; there was nothing for it but to flog a cold chisel through the wrought iron; and though the rust flaked from it if one but scratched with a fingernail, the metal below was sound and tough yet, a heartbreaking thing to assault with mere strength of arm. Further, there is a science of cutting with the cold edge which was outside all their knowledge. The younger lads took turns to hold the chisel while Piet and Klein Piet, swinging alternately, rung a strenuous bob-major on its head; but the hot hours passed in sweat and labor, and afternoon was upon them, while the chain seemed scarcely scratched. It was cruel work for all of them, jarring to the arms and stunning to the ears. At last, Piet dropped his sledge-hammer and wiped the wet from his face.

"Honest men made that chain," he said. "We shall be all to-morrow cutting at it. Hullo! What kafir is this?"

None of them had seen the approach of the kafir who now stood on the edge of the pit looking down at them; he carried his hand to his head in a salute as they looked up at him. He was an old kafir, with tufts of white on his chin and a skin hanging on his loins, gaunt and big and upstanding, with a kind of dignity that was new to them in kafirs. He supported their stare with no embarrassment, and gave them back an unabashed regard of quiet curiosity.

"Who are you?" demanded Piet. "Where do you come from?"

But the kafir could speak no Dutch; he made a reply in some tongue of his own, sonorous and full-throated, and raised his hand again in salute.

"We must know where he comes from," said Piet to the lads. "Between ourselves and our own kafirs, we must find some language he can understand."