Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases | Page 2

the days into relief.
A stranger to the household might have put down Katje's behavior towards the Vrouw Grobelaar as damnable, no less; and in the early days of my acquaintance with the family I was somewhat tempted to this opinion myself. For she not only flouted the old lady to her face, but would upon occasion disregard her utterly, and do it all with what I can only call a swagger that seemed to demand a local application of drastic measures. But Katje knew her victim, if such a word can be applied to the Vrouw Grobelaar, and never prodded her save on her armor. For instance, to say the Kafirs were overdriven and starved was nothing if not flattery--to say they were spoiled and coddled would have been mere brutality.
With it all, the Vrouw Grobelaar went her placid way, like an elephant over egg-shells. Her household did her one service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams had trespassed on devilish domains. The Vrouw Grobelaar believed most entirely in Kafir magic, in witchcraft and second sight, in ghosts and infernal possession, in destiny, and in a very personal arch-fiend who presided over a material hell when not abroad in the world on the war-path. Besides, she had stores of tales from the lives of neighbors and acquaintances: often horrible enough, for the Boers are a lonely folk and God's finger writes large in their lives.
I almost think I can see it now--the low Dutch kitchen with its plank ceiling, the old lady in her chair, with an illustrative forefinger uplifted to punctuate the periods of her tale, the embers, white and red, glowing on the hearth, and the intent shadow-pitted faces of the hearers, agape for horrors.
There was a tale I heard her tell to Katje, when that damsel had seen fit to observe, apropos of disobedience in general, that her grandfather's character had nothing to do with hers. The tale was in plaintive Dutch, the language that makes or breaks a story-teller, for you must hang your point on the gutturals or you miss it altogether.
"Look at my husband's uncle," said the old lady. "A sinful man, forever swearing and cursing, and drinking. His farm was the worst in the district; the very Kafirs were ashamed of it when they went to visit the kraals. But Voss (that was the name of my husband's uncle) cared nothing so long as there was a horse to ride into the dorp on and some money to buy whiskey with. And he drank so much and carried on so wickedly that his wife died and his girls married poor men and never went to stay with their father. So at last he lived in the house, with only his son to help him from being all alone.
"This son was Barend Voss, a great hulking fellow, with the strength of a trek-ox, and never a word of good or bad to throw away on any one. But his face was the face of a violent man. He had blue eyes with no pleasantness about them, but a sort of glitter, as though there were live coals in his brain. He did not drink like his father; and these two would sit together in the evenings, the one bleared and stupid with liquor, and the other watching him in silence across the table.
"They spoke seldom to one another; and it would often happen that the father would speak to the son and get not a word of answer--only that lowering ugly stare that had grown to be a way with the boy.
"I think those two men must have grown to hate each other in the evenings as they sat together; the younger one despising and loathing his father, and the father hating his son for so doing. I have often wondered how they never came to blows--before they did, that is.
"One morning old Voss rode off to the dorp, and Barend watched him from the door till he went out of sight in the kloof. All the day he was away, and when he came back again it was late in the night. Barend was sitting in his usual place at the table scowling over his folded arms.
"Old Voss had not ridden off his liquor; and he staggered into the house singing a dirty English song. He had a bottle in his hands, and banged it down on the table in front of his son.
"'Now, old