“Ja, ja!” answered the old half-breed.  “He tink much about people when he want to tink about them, but he tink most about himself.  Baas Meyer, he a very clever man—­oh! a very clever man, who want to be a great man too.  And one day, Missee, he be a great man, great and rich—­if the Heer God Almighty let him.”

VI

THE GOLD COIN

Six weeks had gone by since the eventful evening of Benita’s arrival at Rooi Krantz.  Now the spring had fully come, the veld was emerald with grass and bright with flowers.  In the kloof behind the house trees had put out their leaves, and the mimosas were in bloom, making the air heavy with their scent.  Amongst them the ringdoves nested in hundreds, and on the steep rocks of the precipice the red-necked vultures fed their young.  Along the banks of the stream and round the borders of the lake the pig-lilies bloomed, a sheet of white.  All the place was beautiful and full of life and hope.  Nothing seemed dead and hopeless except Benita’s heart.

Her health had quite come back to her; indeed, never before had she felt so strong and well.  But the very soul had withered in her breast.  All day she thought, and all night she dreamed of the man who, in cold blood, had offered up his life to save a helpless woman and her child.  She wondered whether he would have done this if he had heard the answer that was upon her lips.  Perhaps that was why she had not been given time to speak that answer, which might have made a coward of him.  For nothing more had been heard of Robert Seymour; indeed, already the tragedy of the ship Zanzibar was forgotten.  The dead had buried their dead, and since then worse disasters had happened in the world.

But Benita could not bury her dead.  She rode about the veld, she sat by the lake and watched the wild fowl, or at night heard them flighting over her in flocks.  She listened to the cooing of the doves, the booming of the bitterns in the reeds, and the drumming of the snipe high in air.  She counted the game trekking along the ridge till her mind grew weary.  She sought consolation from the breast of Nature and found none; she sought it in the starlit skies, and oh! they were very far away.  Death reigned within her who outwardly was so fair to see.

In the society of her father, indeed, she took pleasure, for he loved her, and love comforted her wounded heart.  In that of Jacob Meyer also she found interest, for now her first fear of the man had died away, and undoubtedly he was very interesting; well-bred also after a fashion, although a Jew who had lost his own faith and rejected that of the Christians.

He told her that he was a German by birth, that he had been sent to England as a boy, to avoid the conscription, which Jews dislike, since in soldiering there is little profit.  Here he had become a clerk in a house of South African merchants, and, as a consequence—­having shown all the ability of his race—­was despatched to take charge of a branch business in Cape Colony.  What happened to him there Benita never discovered, but probably he had shown too much ability of an oblique nature.  At any rate, his connection with the firm terminated, and for years he became a wandering “smouse,” or trader, until at length he drifted into partnership with her father.