The covenant - James A. Michener [211]
'He came here singing Psalms. Accomplished nothing with you and me. But he worked on Lodevicus, sowing seeds. And later on he trapped him.' 'What do you truly think of our son?'
'He's going to grow stronger every day. As a boy he was like a piece of soft limestone lying in water. You can cut it with your fingernail. But when it stands clear of the water, and dries in the sun, it becomes harder than granite, and no one can cut it. Rebecca and Vicus, they'll form a terrible partnership.'
As she uttered this prediction, Rebecca was arguing with her husband: 'Vicus, I know I've said it many times before, but I can no longer tolerate that woman. I can't have her godlessness continue to contaminate my house.'
'In point of fact,' Lodevicus said, 'the house is hers and my father's, not yours.'
'Very well, we'll leave it to them and go build our own.'
'But I worked three years building these walls. Be patient. They can't live forever.' Lodevicus was hardening, but he had not yet reached the point at which he could throw his parents out of their own house.
Rebecca was sterner: 'God has directed you and me to bring a new order into a pagan land. We're to form a new life here among the trekboers. We're to raise children according to the Holy Book and not the way that godless old woman raised you and the others.' When Vicus started to protest, she silenced him: 'Don't you realize that God performed a miracle so that you could be saved? Suppose Father had not stopped at your farm to plant the holy seed? Suppose you had not visited Swellendam to have it nurtured? You've been set aside for a noble mission, and we cannot allow it to be diverted.'
Of the four adults engaged in this continuing battle, Mai Adriaan was the only one who saw its dimensions clearly, for he possessed a childlike simplicity which he was willing to turn even upon himself: 'I'm a man of the past, Seena. There's no place in this family for wanderers. Frightened people want to retreat into stone forts.' When his wife asked what he thought of her, he laughed. 'You're a pagan. Daughter of a pagan. There'll be no place for pagans in the world Vicus and Rebecca are building.'
As for Lodevicus, Adriaan supposed that Seena had been correct when she described him as limestone-about-to-become-granite: 'I don't think I'll like the finished result. Too stiff, too unforgiving. And I pity those who cross him.'
Rebecca he saw with unflinching clarity: he sensed that she had declared war upon Seena and him and was probably agitating for their expulsion; but he also saw that she was an exceptional woman whom he might have wanted to marry had he been younger. She was passionate and clean and shining, like a white stone at the bottom of a moving river. Her courage merited enormous respect, for in her zeal to discipline the trekboer world, which he had to admit was lawless, she was like some great mother elephant crashing through the underbush, headed for a destination which she alone perceived, and nothing would stop her. That she felt herself to be driven by God only made her more formidable. She was not cruel, nor did she try to overwhelm her opposition; like a cascade running to the sea, she simply kept moving in her predestined direction.
She would be the inner strength of the new religion developing in South Africa, the silent woman who sat serene in church while the men roared and ranted and announced the Psalms to be sung; but in the privacy of the home it would be she who determined what the day-to-day applications of that public religion were to be, and if ever the men carelessly fumbled their way toward some wrongdoing, she would summon them back to the stern path of duty. She would be against change, against relaxation, against new ideas from abroad, against any bizarre interpretation at home. She would form the granite core of the church, and her quiet teaching would prevail.
In short, Adriaan had grown to respect his daughter-in-law not only as the inexorable force of the future but also as the hard-grained, just human being who was needed at this