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"Mean to say you haven't heard of Guelder and Zorn?" demanded the
young man whose place at breakfast in the boarding-house was opposite
to him, when he asked a question. "Say--d'you know what money is?
Hard, round flat stuff--money? You do know that, eh? Well, Guelder
and Zorn is the same thing."

Somebody laughed. Lucas looked round rather helplessly.

"They say," he explained, referring to the letter, "that they'll be
glad to serve me."

"Then you might lend me a couple of million," suggested the young man
opposite, with entire disbelief. "Them Jews would never miss it."

Lucas had the sense to drop the matter there. He put the letter in
his pocket and went on with his breakfast, and listened with
incredulous interest to the talk that went on about the wealth, the
greatness, the magnificence and power of the financial house which
professed itself anxious to be of use to him. He was sorry to have to
leave the table before it came to an end.

It is characteristic of him that the letter aroused no wild hopes,
nor even an acute curiosity. He came, in the course of the morning,
to the offices of Messrs. Guelder and Zorn in much the same frame of
mind he brought to his business efforts. They were near, but not in,
Wall Street--a fact of some symbolic quality which he, of course,
could not appreciate. He stood on the edge of the side-walk for some
moments, looking up at the solid, responsible block of building which
anchored their fortunes to earth, till some one jostled him into the
gutter. Then he recollected himself and prepared to enter the money-
mill.

A hall porter like a comic German heard his inquiry, scrutinized him
with a withering glare, and jerked a thumb towards a door. He found
himself in such an office as may have seen the first Rothschild make
his first profits--a room austere as a chapel, rigidly confined to
the needs of business. A screen, pierced by pigeon-holes, cut it in
half. Experience has proved that no sum of money is too large to
pass through a pigeon-hole.

"Veil?"

A whiskered, spectacled face, framed in the central pigeon-hole, with
eyes magnified by the spectacles, regarded him sharply.

"Oh!" He recalled himself to his concerns with a jerk, and fumbled in
his pockets. "I had a letter," he explained.

"Vere is de letter?"

He found it, after an exciting search, and passed it over. The
whiskered face developed a hand to receive it.

"I don't know what it's about," explained Lucas.

"Perhaps your people have made a mistake in the name, or something."

"Our beoble," said the face in the pigeon-hole, with malignant
emphasis, "do nod make mistagues!"

There was an interval while the letter was read, and Lucas stood and
fidgeted, with a sense that he was intrusive and petty and undesired.
"Yes," said the owner of the spectacles, at length. "You vait. I vill
enguire."

He left his pigeon-hole unshuttered, and to Lucas, while he waited,
it seemed that several men came to it and glanced at him
forbiddingly. None spoke; they just looked as though in righteous
indignation at his presence, with seventy-five cents in his pocket,
in that high temple of finance. Then the whiskered and spectacled
face fitted itself again into the aperture.

"So you are Mr. Robert H. Lugas, are you?" it inquired. "Den vere vas
you in de year 1886?"

"Where was I?" repeated Lucas vaguely. "Let me see! 1886--yes! I was
in Russia then--in Tambov."

"Yes." The other's regard was keen. "An' now tell me aboud de man dat
lived obbosite to you in Tambov?"

"Do you mean the silversmith?" said Lucas. The other nodded. "Oh,
him! He was a Jew. They expelled him."

"And his vife?"

"His wife! They expelled her too," he answered. "I never heard of her
again."

"Vot vas de last you heard of her?"

"Oh, that!"

Lucas was staring at him vacantly. It did not occur to him that, by
not answering promptly, he might give ground for doubt and suspicion.
The question had re-illuminated in his mind--perhaps for the first
time since the event which it touched--that night of twenty years
before. He flavored again the heady and effervescent vintage of
strong action, of crowded happenings and poignant emotions.

"Veil?" demanded the other.

"There was a police officer," began Lucas obediently; "his name was
Semianoff;" and in bald, halting words he told the story. He told it
absently, languidly, for no words within his reach could convey the
thing as it dwelt in his memory, the warmth and color of it, its
uplifting and transfiguring quality.

The man behind the pigeon-hole heard him intently.

"Yes," he said again, as Lucas finished. "You are de man. Ve do not
reguire further broof, Mr. Lugas."

He produced a slip of paper and a pen which he laid on the ledge
before his pigeon-hole.

"I am instrugted to say dat if you vill fill in and sign dis cheque,
ve vill cash it."

"Eh?" Lucas was slow to understand.

"Ve vill cash it," repeated the other. "You fill it in--and sign it--
and I vill cash it now."

"But"--Lucas took the pen from him in mere obedience to his gesture--
"but--what for?"

"My instrugtions are to cash it--no more!"

Lucas stared at the tight-lipped, elderly face, like the face of a
wise and distrustful gnome, and held the pen uncertainly above the
cheque form.

"How much am I to write?" he asked.

"I haf no instrugtions about de amount," was the reply.

"But," cried Lucas, "I might write fifty thousand dollars!"

"My instrugtions are to cash de cheque ven you haf written it."

"Oh!" said Lucas.

He stared incredulously at the face for some moments and then wrote a
cheque for the sum he had named--fifty thousand dollars. He was about
to add his signature when something occurred to him.

"Is it because I went across the road to that little woman in
Tambov?" he asked suddenly.

The whiskered face answered composedly: "No. It is because you went
out of your rooms and slept on de stairs."

"Because"--he seemed puzzled--"but that is a thing--why, any
gentleman would do it."

"Dose are my instrugtions," said the man behind the pigeon-hole.

"I see."

Lucas stood upright, the uncompleted cheque in his fingers. All
surprise and excitement had vanished from his regard; he seemed
taller and stronger than he had been a minute before. He had yet many
calls to make, and, in the nature of things, many rebuffs to receive,
before he went home to supper; and the money in his pocket totaled
seventy-five cents. He needed new boots, new clothes, leisure,
consideration, and a sight of his native land; in short, he needed
fifty thousand dollars.

"You will cash this because I didn't fail to respect a helpless
woman?" he asked, in level tones.

The whiskered cashier replied: "Yes. Because you gave up your room
and kept watch on de stairs."

Lucas laughed gently. "That is not the way to deal with a gentleman,"
he said. "I will make your firm a present of fifty thousand dollars."

He showed the cheque he had written, with the figures clear and
large. And then, with leisurely motions, he tore it across and again
across.

"Much obliged," said Robert H. Lucas, and made for the door.



XI

THE MAN WHO KNEW

Bearded, bowed, with hard blue eyes that questioned always, so we
knew David Uys as children; an old, remotely quiet man, who was to be
passed on the other side of the street and in silence. I have
wondered sometimes if the old man ever noticed the hush that, ran
before him and the clamor that grew up behind, the games that held
breath, while he went by, and the children that judged him with wide
eyes. He alone, of all the people in the little dorp, made his own
world and possessed it in solitude; about him, the folk held all
interest in community and measured life by a trivial common standard.
At his doorstep, though, lay the frontier of little things; he was
something beyond us all, and therefore greater or less than we. The
mere pictorial value of his tall figure, the dignity of his long,
forked beard, and the expectancy of his patient eyes, must have
settled it that he was greater. I was a child when he died, and
remember only what I saw, but the rest was talk, and so, perhaps,
grew the more upon me.

One day he died. For years he had walked forth in the morning and
back to his house at noon, a purple spot on the raw color of the
town. He had always been still and somewhat ominous, and conveyed to
all who saw him a sense of looking for something. But on this day he
went back briskly, walking well and striding long, with the gait of
one that has good news, and he smiled at those he passed and nodded
to them, unheeding or not seeing their strong surprise nor the alarm
he wrought to the children. He went straight to his little house,
that overlooks a crowded garden and a pool of the dorp spruit,
entered, and was seen no more alive. His servant, a sullen Kafir,
found him in his bed when supper-time came, called him, looked, made
sure, and ran off to spread the news that David Uys was dead. He was
lying, I have learned, as one would lie who wished to die formally,
with a smile on his face and his arms duly crossed. This is copiously
confirmed by many women who crowded, after the manner of Boers, to
see the corpse; and of all connected with him, I think, his end and
the studied manner of it, implying an ultimate deference to the
conventions, have most to do with the awe in which his memory is
preserved.

Now, a death so well conceived, so aptly preluded, must, in the
nature of things, crown and complete a life of singular and strong
quality. A murder without a good motive is mere folly; properly
actuated, it is tragedy, and therefore of worth. So with a death one
seldom dies well, in the technical sense, without having lived well,
in the artistic sense; and a man who will furnish forth a good death-
bed scene seldom goes naked of an excellent tradition. I have been at
some pains to discover the story of David Uys; and though some or the
greater part of it may throw no further back than to the vrouws of
the dorp, it seems to me that they have done their part at least as
well as David Uys did his, and this is the tale I gleaned.

When David was a young man the Boers were not yet scattered abroad
all over the veldt, and the farms lay in to the dorps, and men saw
one another every day. There was still trouble with the Kafirs at
times, little risings and occasional murders, with the sacking and
burning of homesteads, and it was well to have the men within a
couple of days' ride of the field-cornet, for purposes of defense and
retaliation. But when David married all this weighed little with him.

"What need of neighbors?" he said to his young wife. "We have more
need of land--good land and much of it. We will trek."

"It shall be as you will, David," answered Christina. "I have no wish
but yours, and neighbors are nothing to me."

There was a pair of them, you see--both Boers of the best, caring
more for a good fire of their own than to see the smoke from
another's chimney soiling the sky. Within a week of their agreement
the wagons were creaking towards the rising sun, and the whips were
saluting the morning. David and Christina fronted a new world
together, and sought virgin soil. For a full month they journeyed
out, and out-spanned at last, on a mellow evening, on their home.

"Could you live here, do you think, Christina?" asked David, smiling,
and she smiled back at him and made no other answer.

There was no need for one, indeed, for no Boer could pass such a
place. It was a rise, a little rand, flowing out from a tall kopje,
grass and bush to its crown, and at its skirts ran a wide spruit of
clear water. The veldt waved like a sea--not nakedly and forlorn, but
dotted with grey mimosa and big green dropsical aloes, that here and
there showed a scarlet plume like a flame. The country was thigh-deep
in grass and spoke of game; as they looked, a springbok got up and
fled. So here they stayed.

David and his Kafirs built the house, such a house as you see only
when the man who is to make his home in it puts his hand to the
building. David knew but one architecture, that of the great hills
and the sky, and when all was done, the house and its background
clove together like a picture in a fit frame, the one enhancing the
other, the two being one in perfection. It was thatched, with deep
eaves, and these made a cool stoep and cast shadows on the windows;
while the door was red, and took the eye at once, as do the plumes of
the aloes. It was not well devised--to say so would be to lend David
a credit not due to him; but it occurred excellently.

The next thing that occurred was a child, a son, and this set the
pinnacle on their happiness. His arrival was the one great event in
many years, for the multiplication of David's flocks and herds was so
well graduated, the growth of his prosperity so steady and of so even
a process, that it tended rather to content than to joy. It was like
having money rather than like getting it. In the same barefoot quiet
their youth left them, and the constant passing of days marked them,
tenderly at first and then more deeply. Their boy, Frikkie, was a
man, and thinking of marrying, when the consciousness of the leak in
their lives, stood up before them.

They were sitting of an evening on the stoep, watching the sun go
down and pull his ribbons after him, when Christina spoke.

"David," she said, "yesterday was twenty-five years since our
marriage. We--we are growing old, David."

She spoke with a falter, believing what she said. For though the
blood is running strong and warm, and the eye is as clear as the
heart is loyal, twenty-five years is a weary while to count back to
one's youth.

David turned and looked at her. He saw for a moment with her eyes--
saw that the tenseness of her girlhood had vanished, and he was
astonished. But he knew he was strong and hale, well set-up and a
good man to be friends with, and as he gripped his knees, he felt the
tough muscle under his fingers, and it restored him.

"Christina," he said, seeing she was troubled, "it is the same with
both of us. You are not afraid to grow old with me, little cousin?"

She came closer to him but said nothing. It was soon after that, and
a wonderful thing in its way, such as David had never heard of
before, that there came to them another boy, a wee rascal that
shattered all the cobwebs of twenty-five years, and gave Christina
something better to think of than the footsteps of time.

Frikkie had been glorious enough in his time, and was glorious enough
still, for the matter of that; but this was a creature with
exceptional points, which neither David nor Christina--nor, to do him
justice, Frikkie--could possibly overlook. Frikkie had a voice like a
bell, and whiskers like the father of a family, and stood six foot
two in his naked feet, and lacked no excellence that a sturdy
bachelor should possess. But the other, who was born to the name of
Paul, lamented his arrival with a vociferous note of disappointment
in the world that was indescribably endearing; had a head clothed in
down like the intimate garments of an ostrich chick, and was small
enough for David to put in his pocket. He brought a new horizon with
him and imposed it on his parents; he was, in brief, a thing to make
a deacon of a Jew peddler.

Thereafter, life for David and Christina was no longer a single
phenomenon, but a series of developments. It was like sailing in
agreeably rough water. No pensive mood could survive the sight of
mighty Frikkie gambolling like a young bull in the company of Paul;
nor could quiet hours impart a melancholy while the welkin rang with
the voice of the kleintje bullying the adoring Kafirs. Where before
life had glided, now it steeplechased, taking its days bull-headed,
and Paul grew to the age of four as a bamboo grows, in leaps.

Then Frikkie, the huge, the hairy, the heavy-footed, the man who
prided himself on his ability to make circumstances, discovered, in a
revealing flash, that he was, after all, a poor creature, and that
the brightest being on earth was Katje Voss, whose people had settled
about thirty miles off--next door, as it were. Katje held views not
entirely dissimilar, but she consented to marry him, and the big
youth walked on air. Katje was a dumpy Boer girl, with a face all
cream and roses, and a figure that gave promise of much fat
hereafter. Christina had imagined other things, but the ideal is a
rickety structure, and she yielded; while David had never considered
such an emergency, and consented heartily. Behind Frikkie's back he
talked of grandchildren, and was exceedingly happy.

Then his dream-fabric tumbled about his ears.

Frikkie had ridden off to worship his beloved, and David and
Christina, as was their wont, sat on the stoep. They' watched the
figure of their son out of sight, and talked a while, and then lapsed
into the silence of perfect companionship. The veldt was all about
them, as silent and friendly as they, and the distance was mellow
with a haze of heat. From the kraals came at intervals the voice of
little Paul in fluent Kafir; David smiled over his pipe and nodded to
his wife once when the boy's voice was raised in a shout. Christina
was sewing; her thoughts were on Katje, and were still vaguely
hostile.

Of a sudden she heard David's pipe clatter on the ground, and looked
sharply round at him. He was staring intently into the void sky; his
brows were knitted and his face was drawn; even as she turned he gave
a hoarse cry.

She rose quickly, but he rose too, and spoke to her in an unfamiliar
voice.

"Go in," he said. "Have all ready, for our son has met with a mishap.
He has fallen from his horse."

She gasped, and stared at him, but could not speak.

"Go and do it," he said again, looking at her with hard eyes; and
suddenly she saw, as by an inward light, that here was not madness,
but truth. It spurred her.

"I will do it," she said swiftly. "But you will go and bring him in?"

"At once," he replied, and was away to the shed for the cart. The
Kafirs came running to inspan the horses, and shrank from him as they
worked. He was white through his tan, and he breathed loud. Little
Paul saw him, and sat down on the ground and cried quietly.

Before David went his wife touched him on the arm, and he turned. She
was white to the lips.

"David," she said, and struggled with her speech. "David."

"Well?" he answered, with a pregnant calm.

"David, he is not--not dead?"

"Not yet," he answered; "but I cannot say how it will be when I get
there." A tenderness overwhelmed him, and he caught a great sob and
put his arm about her. "All must be ready, little cousin. Time enough
to grieve afterwards--all our lives, Christina, all our lives!"

She put her hand on his breast.

"All shall be ready, David," she answered. "Trust me, David."

He drove off, and she watched him lash the horses down the hill and
force them at the drift--he, the man who loved horses, and knew them
as he knew his children. His children! She fled into the house to do
her office, and to drink to the bottom of the cup the bitterness of
motherhood. A cool bed, linen, cold water and hot water, brandy and
milk, all the insignia of the valley of the shadow did she put to
hand, and con over and adjust and think upon, and then there was the
waiting. She waited on the stoep, burning and tortured, boring at the
horizon with dry eyes, and praying and hoping. A lifetime went in
those hours, and the sun was slanting down before the road yielded,
far and far away, a speck that grew into a cart going slowly. By and
by she was able to see her husband driving, but nobody with him--only
a rag or a garment that fluttered from the side. Her mind snatched at
it; was it--God! what was it?

David drove into the yard soberly; she was at the stoep.

"All is ready," she said, in a low voice. "Will you bring him in?"

"Yes," he said; and she went inside with her heart thrashing like a
kicking horse.

David carried in his son in his arms; he was not yet past that. On
the white bed inside they laid him, and where his fair head touched
the pillow it dyed it red. Frikkie's face was white and blue, and his
jaw hung oddly; but once he was within the door, some reinforcement
of association came to Christina, and she went about her ministry
purposefully and swiftly, a little comforted. At the back of her
brain dwelt some idea such as this: here was her house, her home,
there David, there Frikkie, here she, and where these were together
Death could never make the fourth. The same thought sends a stricken
child to its mother. David leant on the foot of the bed, his burning
eyes on the face of his son, and his brows tortured with anxiety.
Christina brought some drink in a cup and held it to the still lips
of the young man.

"Drink. Frikkie," she pleaded softly. "Drink, my kleintje. Only a
drop, Frikkie, and the pain will fly away."

She spoke as though he were yet a child, for a mother knows nothing
of manhood when her son lies helpless. The arts that made him a man
shall keep him a man; so she coaxed the closed eyes and the dumb
mouth.

But Frikkie would not drink, heard nothing, gave no sign. Christina
laid drenched cloths to his forehead, deftly cleansed and bandaged
the gaping rent in the base of the skull whence the life whistled
forth, and talked to her boy all the while in the low crooning mother
voice. David never moved from the foot of the bed, and never loosed
his drawn brows. In came little Paul silently and took his hand, but
he never looked down, and the father and the child remained there
throughout the languid afternoon.

Evening cool was growing up when Frikkie opened his eyes. Christina
was wetting towels for bandages, and her back was towards him, but
she knew instantly, and came swiftly to his side. David leaned
forward breathlessly, and little Paul cried out with the grip of his
hand. They saw a waver of recognition in Frikkie's eyes, a fond
light, and it seemed that his lips moved. Christina laid her ear to
them.

"And--a--shod--horse!" murmured Frikkie. Nothing more. An hour after
he was cold, and David was alone on the stoep, questioning pitiless
skies and groping for God, while Christina knelt beside the bed
within and wept blood from her soul.

They buried Frikkie in a little kraal on the hillside, and David made
the coffin. When he nailed down the lid he was an old man; when the
first red clod rang on it, he felt that life had emptied itself. When
they were back in the house again, Christina turned to him.

"You knew," she said, in a strange voice--"you knew, but you could
not save him." And she laughed aloud. David covered his face with his
hands and groaned, but the next instant Christina's arms were about
him.

Yet of their old life, before the deluge of grief, too much was happy
to be all swamped. Time softened the ruggedness of their wound
somewhat, and a day came when all the world was no longer black.
Little Paul helped them much, for what had once been Frikkie's was
now his; and as he grew before their eyes, his young strength and
beauty were a balm to them. David was much abroad in the lands now,
for he was growing mealies and rapidly becoming a rich man; and as he
rode oft in the morning and rode in at sundown, his new gravity of
mind and mien broke up to the youngster who jumped at the stirrup
with shouts and laughter, and demanded to ride on the saddle-bow. At
intervals, also, Paul laid claim to a gun, to spurs, to a watch, to
all the things that go in procession across a child's horizon, and
Christina was not proof against the impulse to smile at him.

It is not to be thought, of course, that the shock of foreknowledge,
of omnipotent vision, had left David scathless. Though the other
details of the tragedy shared his memory, and elbowed the terrifying
sense of revelation, he would find himself now and again peering at
the future, straining to foresee, as a sailor bores at a fog-bank.
Then he would catch himself, and start back shuddering to the instant
matters about him. Eventualities he could meet, but in their season
and hand to hand; afar off they mastered him. Christina, too, dwelt
on it at seasons; but, by some process of her woman's mind, it was
less dreadful to her than to David: she, too, could dream at times.

One day she was at work within the house, and Paul ran in and out.
She spoke to him once about introducing an evil-smelling water-
tortoise; he went forth to exploit it in the yard. From time to time
his shrill voice reached her; then the frayed edges of David's black
trousers of ceremony engaged her, to the exclusion of all else.
Between the scissors and the needle, at last, there stole on her ear
a faint tap, tap--such a sound as water dropping on to a board makes.
It left her unconscious for a while, and then grew a little louder,
with a note of vehemence. At last she looked up and listened. Tap,
tap, it went, and she sprang from her chair and went to the stoep and
looked out along the road. Far off on the hillside was a horse,
ridden furiously on the downward road, and though dwarfed by the
miles, she could see the rider flogging and his urgent crouch over
the horse's withers. It was a picture of mad speed, of terror and
violence, and struck her with a chill. Were the Kafirs risen? she
queried. Was there war abroad? Was this mad rider her husband?

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