The covenant - James A. Michener [373]
Here he paused, for from his window he could see Paulus and his grandchild Sybilla, twelve and nine, walking beside the lake, and as always, she held on to his hand. Impulsively, Tjaart set aside his own miseries and prayed: God, protect those two. They are the seed of our nation.
Then he returned to himself: The years roll past so swiftly, and we are so many miles from the families we knew at De Kraal and Graaff-Reinet. I'm alone, and I need this woman, whatever her behavior, and I shall keep her.
Strong in his resolve, he stormed back into community life with fire and terror. Grabbing his gun and marching to the hut of Balthazar Bronk, he called him out, aimed the rifle directly at his heart, and cried in loud voice, 'Balthazar, pack your wagon and leave within the hour. Elsewise, I shoot you dead.'
'But what . . .' It was Bronk's wife, peering out from the hut.
'He knows' was all Tjaart would say. And he stood there while the Bronk family packed and sorted out their cattle from the common herd.
'Where shall I go?' Bronk said in a whining voice.
'I care not,' Tjaart snapped, and he called for Paulus to fetch another gun and stand guard with him till the wagon was rolling.
'Give them our biltong,' Tjaart growled, and Paulus ran to fetch the Van Doorn supplies. When the wagon started to move, Tjaart waited till it was well under way, then fired shots over it to warn the Bronks that they must not turn back, but on the second volley Aletta appeared, crying that she must run to join them.
Once again Tjaart, who could manage men so ably, flew into a red fury when called upon to reason with a woman. Throwing his gun to Paulus, he grabbed his wife by the arm, swung her about, and used the only logic he knew: he struck her three times across the face, and when she fell into the dust, he reached down, pulled her back to her feet, and struck her again.
'Into the hut!' he commanded, and all that day the neighbors watched as he sat by the door, gun in hand, saying nothing.
At sunset he went inside, and when he undressed for bed and stood before his wife, she burst into uncontrollable tears: 'You're old and fat and you have a big belly. Ryk was so young and strong. I despise you.'
With a great swing of his arm he knocked her down once more, so that she ran screaming from the hut, with him chasing her in only his pantalets.
'I shall go after him,' she wailed.
'Do,' he shouted. 'Go into the darkness, with the lions waiting.'
And when she had taken only a few steps, she saw the eyes of those animals who came to the lake at night, and she heard strange sounds and the muffled roaring of a distant lion, so terrifying that she hurried back to the protection of the village, and after a while, into her own hut.
Tjaart was waiting. With compassion and a profound unexplainable love, he took her in his arms and said, 'Ryk was young and beautiful, but he's dead. I'm old and fat, but I'm alive. That's how it is.' And that night Aletta conceived the boy Jakob, named after Tjaart's revered second wife.
IN the middle years of the nineteenth century a chain of unlikely events inspired Queen Victoria to confer a knighthood on Major Richard Saltwood, of De Kraal, Cape Colony, and when this occurred, cartoonists of South Africa and England lampooned him in a congenial way as Sir Cupid. He was a hero, and his investiture became an act of warm celebration, uniting the colony more firmly to the mother country.
Saltwood's personal good luck began in 1856 when he was catapulted into national prominence because of a disaster which riveted the attention of the world. It began one autumn morning in May 1856 when a short, frail girl of fourteen went to a pool in a stream east of the Great Fish River and saw therein a ghostly assembly of figures accompanied by swirling mists.
This might have had no aftermath had not the girl, Nongqause, happened to be the niece of that cunning seer Mhlakaza, whom Tjaart van Doorn had come close to shooting back in 1836. Now, after twenty additional years of chicanery and