The covenant - James A. Michener [317]
'He's the man I seek,' Tjaart said, pleased that his business would keep him in touch with this exciting girl. 'Is it true that he has a wagon for sale?'
'He has almost everything,' Aletta said with a fetching toss of her head, and in the various events that accompanied Nachtmaal she demonstrated that, like her father in his store, she, too, had almost everything: smiles, witticisms, grace, and enormous sexual magnetism.
For Minna that first Friday was agony. One close look at the radiant Aletta warned her that chances for catching Ryk Naude had vanished, and this so confused her that she did a series of things that made her look quite foolish. First she sought Ryk at his wagon to remind him of what he had promised her two years ago . . . 'We were children then,' he said.
'But you told me.'
'Things have happened.'
'But you told me,' she repeated, clutching at his hand, and when he tried to pull away, she grabbed at him. She wanted him, desperately she wanted him, terrified by the prospect of returning to isolated De Kraal for another span of years, after which she might be too old to catch herself a husband.
Ryk, at eighteen, had never experienced anything like this, for Aletta had permitted him only to hold her hand; he became so confused he did not know what to do, but his mother came up, deduced what was happening, and said calmly, 'Hello, Minna. Hadn't you better be joining your parents?'
'Ryk said that he'
'Minna,' Mevrouw Naude said, 'you'd better gonow.' 'But he promised'
'Minna! Go home!' And she thrust the bewildered child away.
The following days were torment. In church Minna, like her father, stared at Aletta, and one evening as service ended she followed the girl to her father's store and confronted her: 'Ryk Naude is promised to me.'
'Minna, don't be foolish. Ryk and I are going to be married.'
'No! He told me . . .'
'Whatever he told you,' Aletta said with a sweetness that would have mollified anyone else, 'was two years ago. You were children, and now he's a man and he's going to marry me.'
'I won't let you!' Minna cried, her voice rising so sharply that Mijnheer Probenius came out from his shop to see his daughter being assaulted by a strange girl much her junior in years.
'What goes on here?' he cried, and when it became apparent that the girls were fighting over a man, he laughed heartily and said, 'You ask me, that Ryk's not worth the trouble. You'd both be better off without him.'
Placing his arms about the two girls, he sat with them, telling Minna, 'You can't be more than thirteen. In Holland, where I came from, girls don't marry till they're twenty. Minna, you have seven years.'
'Not in the wilderness. And Ryk promised me . . .'
'Men promise a lot of things,' Probenius said. 'In Holland right now are three girls I promised to marry when I returned home to Haarlem. And here I am in Graaff-Reinet with a daughter sixteen years old who's to be married on Tuesday.'
'Married!' Minna cried, and she dissolved into tears, the shattering, soul-wrenching tears of a little girl striving to act like a woman.
To her surprise, Probenius took her round, tear-spattered face in his two hands, brought it up, and kissed it. 'Minna, this world is full of young men who need a wife like you.'
'Not in the wilderness,' she repeated stubbornly as Probenius got her to her feet, saying, 'Let's no one speak of this.' And he gently moved her along toward her parents' wagon.
Of course, everyone spoke of it, and when Tjaart reported at the store to dicker about the exchange of his sheep for a new wagon, he found Probenius, a man somewhat older than himself, disturbed that gossip should have struck so hard at little Minna: 'She's a fine child, Van Doorn, and I'm sorry this has happened. But she'll find a host of young men.'
'Her heart was set on Ryk. What kind of fellow is he?'
'The usual. Talks