The covenant - James A. Michener [249]
Saltwood looked up at the man who had saved his life. He tried to justify his feelings of repugnance, but he could form no words. 'It's all right, Dominee,' Tjaart said. 'We taught the Kaffir bastards a lesson they'll remember. Till next time.'
'Next time?'
Tjaart tugged at his beard. 'It will never stop, Dominee. Not till one side is victor in this land.'
Saltwood had to admit, though reluctantly, that what Van Doorn was saying was true, but he did not voice this thought, for next to him the young Xhosa warrior, no more than a boy, shuddered and lay still.
When Hilary Saltwood's letter reached Sentinels in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral, his mother was fifty-four years old, a widow and eager to help her distant son find the proper wife. The commission was not an unusual one in rural England. Sons of distinguished families would venture to all parts of the world, serving for years as outriders of civilization in places like India, South America and Ceylon, without ever thinking of marrying local women the way Portuguese and French colonizers did. An Englishman remembered the girl left behind, and when he was in his mid-thirties he would come home, and some gaunt woman in her early thirties, who in another society would never find a husband, would be waiting, and they would repair to the village church, two people who had been terrified of missing life, and they would be married, and flowers would be scattered, and the local curate would dry his eyes at this little miracle, and soon the pair would be off to some other remote spot.
Or, as in this case, the son would write home to his parents and ask them to pursue his courtship for him, and they would visit only the daughters of families they had known for a generation, and again some older woman who might never have married would find that she was needed in some far country by a man she could only vaguely remember. This was the English pattern, and men who deviated from it by marrying local women were apt to find their lives truncated, if not ruined.
Emily Saltwood, upon reading her son's appeal, retired to her room for two days and reflected upon the marriageable daughters of her friends, and after trying her best to judge the girls from a man's point of view, and a missionary's, she decided that the family she must visit was the Lambtons, who lived across the bridge within the purlieus of the cathedral.
Wishing not to share her secret mission with any servant, she elected not to use her carriage but to walk to the village, where she sought out the bricked path leading to the Lambton residence, at whose door she knocked quietly. After an interval that troubled her, because it seemed that no one was at home, she heard shuffling feet approach, and an elderly maid creaked open the door. 'Mrs. Lambton is not at home,' she said. Nor was Miss Lambton there, but there was a possibility that they could be found near the cathedral grounds, for they had planned on having tea in that vicinity.
Emily said, 'You know, it's frightfully important that I see Mrs. Lambton immediately, and I think you'd better go fetch them.'
'I couldn't leave the house, ma'am.' The maid was insistent.
'On this day you'd better.' Emily Saltwood could be just as insistent.
'Couldn't you go and meet them at the cathedral?'
'No, I couldn't. Because what I have to discuss is not for an open park. Now you scurry off and find your mistress, or I'll take this umbrella to you.'
This the maid understood, and after a while she returned, leading both Mrs. Lambton and her daughter Vera. This was rather more than Emily had expected, so she said quite brusquely, 'It was your mother I wished to see,' and the tall girl, twenty-nine years old and somewhat timid, dutifully vanished.
'I've had a curious letter from my son Hilary, in South Africa,' Emily began, and without another word being spoken, Mrs. Lambton grasped the significance of this abrupt meeting. Keeping her hands under discipline, lest