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CHAPTER 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.
Whatever might have been his past, however, soon she found that he was
an extremely able and agreeable man. It was he and no other who had
painted the water-colours that adorned her room, and he could play and
sing as well as he painted. Also, as Robert had told her, Mr. Meyer
was very well-read in subjects that are not usually studied on the
veld of South Africa; indeed, he had quite a library of books, most of
them histories or philosophical and scientific works, of which he
would lend her volumes. Fiction, however, he never read, for the
reason, he told her, that he found life itself and the mysteries and
problems which surround it so much more interesting.
One evening, when they were walking together by the lake, watching the
long lights of sunset break and quiver upon its surface, Benita's
curiosity overcame her, and she asked him boldly how it happened that
such a man as he was content to live the life he did.
"In order that I may reach a better," he answered. "Oh! no, not in the
skies, Miss Clifford, for of them I know nothing, nor, as I believe,
is there anything to know. But here--here."
"What do you mean by a better life, Mr. Meyer?"
"I mean," he answered, with a flash of his dark eyes, "great wealth,
and the power that wealth brings. Ah! I see you think me very sordid
and materialistic, but money is God in this world, Miss Clifford--
money is God."
She smiled and answered: "I fear, then, that he is likely to prove an
invisible god on the high veld, Mr. Meyer. You will scarcely make a
great fortune out of horse-breeding, and here there is no one to
rule."
"Do you suppose, then, that is why I stop at Rooi Krantz, just to
breed horses? Has not your father told you about the great treasure
hidden away up there among the Makalanga?"
"I have heard something of it," she answered with a sigh. "Also that
both of you went to look for it and were disappointed."
"Ah! The Englishman who was drowned--Mr. Seymour--he spoke of it, did
he not? He found us there."
"Yes; and you wished to shoot him--do you remember?"
"God in Heaven! Yes, because I thought he had come to rob us. Well, I
did not shoot, and afterwards we were hunted out of the place, which
does not much matter, as those fools of natives refused to let us dig
in the fortress."
"Then why do you still think about this treasure which probably does
not exist?"
"Why, Miss Clifford, do you think about various things that probably
do not exist? Perhaps because you feel that here or elsewhere they
/do/ exist. Well, that is what I feel about the treasure, and what I
have always felt. It exists, and I shall find it--now. I shall live to
see more gold than you can even imagine, and that is why I still
continue to breed horses on the Transvaal veld. Ah! you laugh; you
think it is a nightmare that I breed----"
Then suddenly he became aware of Sally, who had appeared over the fold
of the rise behind them, and asked irritably:
"What is it now, old vrouw?"
"The Baas Clifford wants to speak with you, Baas Jacob. Messengers
have come to you from far away."
"What messengers?" he asked.
"I know not," answered Sally, fanning her fat face with a yellow
pocket-handkerchief. "They are strange people to me, and thin with
travelling, but they talk a kind of Zulu. The Baas wishes you to
come."
"Will you come also, Miss Clifford? No? Then forgive me if I leave
you," and lifting his hat he went.
"A strange man, Missee," said old Sally, when he had vanished, walking
very fast.
"Yes," answered Benita, in an indifferent voice.
"A very strange man," went on the old woman. "Too much in his kop,"
and she tapped her forehead. "I tink it will burst one day; but if it
does not burst, then he will be great. I tell you that before, now I
tell it you again, for I tink his time come. Now I go cook dinner."
Benita sat by the lake till the twilight fell, and the wild geese
began to flight over her. Then she walked back to the house thinking
no more of Heer Meyer, thinking only that she was weary of this place
in which there was nothing to occupy her mind and distract it from its
ever present sorrow.
At dinner, or rather supper, that night she noticed that both her
father and his partner seemed to be suffering from suppressed
excitement, of which she thought she could guess the cause.
"Did you find your messengers, Mr. Meyer?" she asked, when the men had
lit their pipes, and the square-face--as Hollands was called in those
days, from the shape of the bottle--was set upon the rough table of
speckled buchenhout wood.
"Yes, I found them," he answered; "they are in the kitchen now." And
he looked at Mr. Clifford.
"Benita, my dear," said her father, "rather a curious thing has
happened." Her face lit up, but he shook his head. "No, nothing to do
with the shipwreck--that is all finished. Still, something that may
interest you, if you care to hear a story."
Benita nodded; she was in a mood to hear anything that would occupy
her thoughts.
"You know something about this treasure business," went on her father.
"Well, this is the tale of it. Years ago, after you and your mother
had gone to England, I went on a big game shooting expedition into the
interior. My companion was an old fellow called Tom Jackson, a rolling
stone, and one of the best elephant hunters in Africa. We did pretty
well, but the end of it was that we separated north of the Transvaal,
I bringing down the ivory that we had shot, and traded, and Tom
stopping to put in another season, the arrangement being that he was
to join me afterwards, and take his share of the money. I came here
and bought this farm from a Boer who was tired of it--cheap enough,
too, for I only gave him £100 for the 6,000 acres. The kitchens behind
were his old house, for I built a new one.
"A year had gone by before I saw any more of Tom Jackson, and then he
turned up more dead than alive. He had been injured by an elephant,
and lay for some months among the Makalanga to the north of
Matabeleland, where he got fever badly at a place called Bambatse, on
the Zambesi. These Makalanga are a strange folk. I believe their name
means the People of the Sun; at any rate, they are the last of some
ancient race. Well, while he was there he cured the old Molimo, or
hereditary high-priest of this tribe, of a bad fever by giving him
quinine, and naturally they grew friendly. The Molimo lived among
ruins of which there are many over all that part of South Africa. No
one knows who built them now; probably it was people who lived
thousands of years ago. However, this Molimo told Tom Jackson a more
recent legend connected with the place.
"He said that six generations before, when his great-great-great
grandfather was chief (Mambo, he called it), the natives of all that
part of South Africa rose against the white men--Portuguese, I suppose
--who still worked the gold there. They massacred them and their
slaves by thousands, driving them up from the southward, where
Lobengula rules now, to the Zambesi by which the Portuguese hoped to
escape to the coast. At length a remnant of them, not more than about
two hundred men and women, arrived at the stronghold called Bambatse,
where the Molimo now lives in a great ruin built by the ancients upon
an impregnable mountain which overhangs the river. With them they
brought an enormous quantity of gold, all the stored-up treasure of
the land which they were trying to carry off. But although they
reached the river they could not escape by it, since the natives, who
pursued them in thousands, watched day and night in canoes, and the
poor fugitives had no boats. Therefore it came about that they were
shut up in this fortress which it was impossible to storm, and there
slowly perished of starvation.
"When it was known that they were all dead, the natives who had
followed them from the south, and who wanted blood and revenge, not
gold, which was of no use to them, went away; but the old priest's
forefather who knew the secret entrance to the place, and who had been
friendly to the Portuguese, forced his way in and there, amidst the
dead, found one woman living, but mad with grief--a young and
beautiful girl, the daughter of the Portuguese lord or captain. He
gave her food, but in the night, when some strength had returned to
her, she left him, and at daybreak he found her standing on the peak
that overhangs the river, dressed all in white.
"He called some of his councillors, and they tried to persuade her to
come down from the rock, but she answered, 'No, her betrothed and all
her family and friends were dead, and it was her will to follow them.'
Then they asked where was the gold, for having watched day and night
they knew it had not been thrown into the river. She answered that it
was where it was, and that, seek as he might, no black man would ever
find it. She added that she gave it into his keeping, and that of his
descendants, to safeguard until she came again. Also she said that if
they were faithless to that trust, then it had been revealed to her
from heaven above that those same savages who had killed her father
and her people, would kill his people also. When she had spoken thus
she stood a while praying on the peak, then suddenly hurled herself
into the river, and was seen no more.
"From that day to this the ruin has been held to be haunted, and save
the Molimo himself, who retires there to meditate and receive
revelations from the spirits, no one is allowed to set a foot in its
upper part; indeed, the natives would rather die than do so.
Consequently the gold still remains where it was hidden. This place
itself Tom Jackson did not see, since, notwithstanding his friendship
for him, the Molimo refused to allow him to enter there.
"Well, Tom never recovered; he died here, and is buried in the little
graveyard behind the house which the Boers made for some of their
people. It was shortly before his death that Mr. Meyer became my
partner, for I forgot to say that I had told him the story, and we
determined to have a try for that great wealth. You know the rest. We
trekked to Bambatse, pretending to be traders, and found the old
Molimo who knew of me as having been Tom Jackson's friend. We asked
him if the story he had told to Jackson were true, and he answered
that, surely as the sun shone in the heavens, it was true--every word
of it--for it, and much more than he had spoken of, had been handed
down from father to son, and that they even knew the name of the white
lady who had killed herself. It was Ferreira--your mother's name,
Benita, though a common one enough in South Africa.
"We asked him to allow us to enter the topmost stronghold, which
stands upon the hill, but he refused, saying that the curse still lay
upon him and his, and that no man should enter until the lady Ferreira
came again. For the rest the place was free to us; we might dig as we
would. So we did dig, and found some gold buried with the ancients,
beads and bangles and wire--about £100 worth. Also--that was on the
day when the young Seymours came upon us, and accounts for Meyer's
excitement, for he thought that we were on the track of the treasure--
we found a single gold coin, no doubt one that had been dropped by the
Portuguese. Here it is." And he threw a thin piece of gold on the
table before her. "I have shown it to a man learned in those matters,
and he says that it is a ducat struck by one of the doges of Venice.
"Well, we never found any more. The end of it was that the Makalanga
caught us trying to get in to the secret stronghold by stealth, and
gave us the choice of clearing out or being killed. So we cleared out,
for treasure is not of much use to dead men."
Mr. Clifford ceased speaking, and filled his pipe, while Meyer helped
himself to squareface in an absent manner. As for Benita, she stared
at the quaint old coin, which had a hole in it, wondering with what
scenes of terror and of bloodshed it had been connected.
"Keep it," said her father. "It will go on that bracelet of yours."
"Thank you, dear," she answered. "Though I don't know why I should
take all the Portuguese treasure since we shall never see any more of
it."
"Why not, Miss Clifford?" asked Meyer quickly.
"The story tells you why--because the natives won't even let you look
for it; also, looking and finding are different things."
"Natives change their minds sometimes, Miss Clifford. That story is
not done, it is only begun, and now you shall hear its second chapter.
Clifford, may I call in the messengers?" And without waiting for an
answer he rose and left the room.
Neither Mr. Clifford nor his daughter said anything after he had gone.
Benita appeared to occupy herself in fixing the broad gold coin to a
little swivel on her bracelet, but while she did so once more that
sixth sense of hers awoke within her. As she had been afraid at the
dinner on the doomed steamer, so again she was afraid. Again death and
great fear cast their advancing shadows on to her soul. That piece of
gold seemed to speak to her, yet, alas! she could not understand its
story. Only she knew that her father and Jacob Meyer and--yes, yes,
yes--Robert Seymour, had all a part in that tragedy. Oh! how could
that be when he was dead? How could this gold link him to her? She
knew not--she cared not. All she knew was that she would follow this
treasure to the edge of the world, and if need be, over it, if only it
brought her back to him again.
Content of CHAPTER VI - THE GOLD COIN [H. Rider Haggard's novel: Benita]
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