The covenant - James A. Michener [420]
One evening Maud rode out to talk with the princess as she patrolled the roadway. 'Why do you torment him?'
'Because he has tormented me. He wants to send me to jail.'
'Did you forge the seven papers?'
'I have been Mr. Rhodes' staunchest supporter. He owes me enormous sums.'
'Didn't he pay your hotel bill when the Mount Nelson threatened to evict you?' Before the princess could respond, she added, 'And when you accepted the money, didn't you promise that you'd leave South Africa?'
'I did leave,' she protested like an insulted innocent, 'but I came back.'
'Princess, what can you hope to achieve by this ridiculous behavior?'
'Prison, I suppose. But men who ignore women, or treat them badly they must be taught a lesson. When I'm through with Cecil Rhodes the entire world will be laughing at him.'
'They're already laughing at you. Have you seen the cartoons?'
'Cartoons are for today,' she huffed. 'I am for history.'
Maud achieved nothing, and when she drove off, the princess was still stalking back and forth in the shadows, casting a witch-like spell on the cottage and its inhabitants.
Despite all that the two Saltwoods tried to do to bring sanity into this mad affair, the criminal trial moved forward, complicated by civil trials on lesser matters, and the day came when the two protagonists faced each other before a judge sitting with his clerks at Groote Schuur, since Rhodes was too ill to appear in a regular Cape Town court. They met in bitterness, they testified in bitterness, with Rhodes stating categorically that he had never signed any papers on behalf of the princess, and that if she had peddled such promissory notes to the bankers and money lenders of Cape Town, she had done so as a forger.
His testimony, ungracious and unforgiving, condemned the woman to imprisonment; her testimony, malicious and biting, condemned him as a fool. Worse, it condemned him to death.
After appearing before the judge, he retreated to the miserable cottage, where Frank ordered a hole knocked in the bedroom wall so that Rhodes could catch the air for which he gasped continuously. If he lay down, he could not breathe; if he sat up, he could not rest. Still the princess marched back and forth, keeping her death watch; knowing that she could not escape incarceration, she showed no mercy. She would haunt this ungracious, unforgiving man to his death.
'Please go away,' Frank pleaded with her one night.
'This is my only freedom.'
'Have you any money left? Any at all?'
Im a pauper. I haven't enough to eat. I shall welcome the security of prison, for all my friends have abandoned me, a princess of the Russian court.' She pronounced the word Rrrosshian.
He gave her two pounds and told her to go to the Muizenberg Pavilion and eat, but she continued her vigil.
The breath of air Rhodes sought in that dreadfully hot March never reached him, and when he felt that death would overtake him before the criminal trial reached a conclusion, he dismissed her from his mind completely. Asking for his beloved atlas, he talked with Frank about those portions of his plans still to be realized: 'You must make the map red. Look how much we've done so far.'
When his hand fell upon Rhodesia, he looked up almost pitifully and asked, 'They never change the name of a country, do they?'
'No,' Frank said. 'That will always be Rhodesia. Your monument.'
But then Rhodes' eyes could not avoid the areas which represented his gnawing defeats: South-West Africa had fallen to the Germans; Mozambique still rested in Portuguese hands; the damned Belgians had proved their hearts were made of concrete. But worst of all, while Rhodes was suffering torment from the princess, a far greater agony had raged around him, for Boer and Englishman had finally come to fratricidal blows on the South African veld. His