He was correct.
– 10 –
In the dawn as Sean cleaned his face with a cloth dipped in a mug of hot water, regarding its reflection in the small metal mirror, the only fact that gave him the faintest satisfaction was the two hundred-odd sovereigns he had salvaged from the night’s debauch.
‘Are you sick, Pa?’ Dirk’s ghoulish interest in Sean’s condition added substantially to his evil temper.
‘Eat your breakfast.’ Sean’s tone was calculated by its sheer malevolence to dry up further questioning.
‘There is no food.’ Mbejane fell into the familiar role of protector.
‘Why not?’ Sean focused his bloodshot eyes upon him.
‘There is one among us who considers the purchase of strong drink, and other things, more important than food for his son.’
From the pocket of his jacket Sean drew a handful of sovereigns. ‘Go!’ he ordered. ‘Buy food and fresh horses. Go quickly so that in my grave illness I may not be afflicted with the wisdom of your counsel. Take Dirk with you.’
Mbejane examined the money, and grinned.
‘The night was not wasted.’
When they had gone back to Frere, Dirk trotting beside the huge half-naked Zulu and his voice only fading at a distance of a hundred yards, Sean poured himself another mug of coffee and cupping it in his hands he sat staring into the ash and pink coals of the fire. He could trust Mbejane to use the money with care, he had the bargaining patience peculiar to his race that could if necessary devote two days to the purchase of a single ox. These things did not concern Sean now. Instead he went over the events of the previous night. Still sickened by his display of murderous rage, he tried to justify it. Taking into account the loss of nearly all he owned, the accumulation of years of hard work that had been stripped from him in a single day; the hardship and uncertainty that had followed. And finally he had reached the flash point when liquor and poker-tensed nerves had snapped the last reserve in him and translated it all into that violent outburst.
But that was not all, he knew he had avoided the main issue. Ruth. As he came back to her a wave of hopeless longing overwhelmed him, a tender despair such as he had never experienced before. He groaned aloud, and lifted his eyes to the morning star which was fading on the pink horizon as the sun came up behind.
For a while longer he wallowed in the softness of his love, remembering the way she walked, the dark serenity of her eyes and her mouth when she smiled and her voice when she sang – until it threatened to smother him in its softness.
Then he sprang to his feet and paced restlessly in the grass beside the fire. We must leave this place, ride away from it – go quickly. I must find something to do, some way to keep from thinking of it, something to fill my hands which ache now from the need to hold her.
Along the road, going north to Colenso, a long column of infantry filed past him in the dawn. He stopped his pacing and watched them. Each man leaned forward against his pack and the rifles stood up behind their shoulders.
Yes, he thought, I will go with them. Perhaps at the place to which they march I can find what I could not find last night. We will go home to Ladyburg, riding hard on fresh horses. I will leave Dirk with my mother, then come back to this war.
He began to pace again impatiently. Where the hell was Mbejane?
From the heights above, Sean looked down on Ladyburg. The village spread in a neat circle around the spire of the church. He remembered the spire as beacon-bright in its cladding of new copper, but nineteen years of weather had dulled it to a mellow brown.
Nineteen years. It did not seem that long. There were goods yards around the station now, a new concrete bridge over the Baboon Stroom, the blue gums in the plantation beyond the school were taller, and the flamboyants that had lined the main street were gone.
With a strange reluctance Sean turned his head and looked out to the right, across the Baboon Stroom, close in against the escarpment, to where he had left the sprawling Dutch gabled homestead of Theuniskraal with its roof of combed yellow thatch and the shutters of yellow-wood across the windows.
It was there, but not as he remembered it. Even at this distance he could see the walls were flaking and mottled with patches of dampness; the thatch was shaggy as the coat of an airedale; one of the shutters tilted slightly from a broken hinge; the lawns were brown and ragged where the bare earth showed through. The dairy behind the house had crumbled, its roof gone and the remains of its walls jutted forlornly upwards to the height of a man’s shoulder.
‘Damn the little bastard!’ Sean’s anger flared abruptly as he saw the neglect with which his twin brother had treated the lovely old house. ‘He’s so lazy he wouldn’t get out of a bed he’d peed in.’