Zulu (African people) -- Fiction; Zululand (South Africa) -- History -- Fiction
Of her father there was absolutely no trace in Rachel, except a certain
physical resemblance—so far as he was concerned she must have thrown
back to some earlier progenitor. Even their intellects and moral
outlook were quite different. She had, it is true, something of his
scholarly power; thus, notwithstanding her wild upbringing, as has been
said, she could read the Greek Testament almost as well as he could, or
even Homer, which she liked because the old, bloodthirsty heroes
reminded her of the Zulus. He had taught her this and other knowledge,
and she was an apt pupil. But there the resemblance stopped. Whereas
his intelligence was narrow and enslaved by the priestly tradition,
hers was wide and human. She searched and she criticised; she believed
in God as he did, but she saw His purpose working in the evil as in the
good. In her own thought she often compared these forces to the Day and
Night, and believed both of them to be necessary to the human world.
For her, savagery had virtues as well as civilisation, although it is
true of the latter she knew but little.
From her mother Rachel had inherited more, for instance her grace of
speech and bearing, and her intuition, or foresight. Only in her case
this curious gift did not dominate her, her other forces held it in
check. She felt and she knew, but feeling and knowledge did not
frighten or make her weak, any more than the strength of her frame or
of her spirit made her unwomanly. She accepted these things as part of
her mental equipment, that was all, being aware that to her a door was
opened which is shut firmly enough in the faces of most folk, but not
on that account in the least afraid of looking through it as her mother
was.
Thus when she saw the man called Ishmael, she knew well enough that he
was destined to bring great evil upon her and hers, as when as a child
she met the boy Richard Darrien, she had known other things. But she
did not, therefore, fear the man and his attendant evil. She only
shrank from the first and looked through the second, onward and outward
to the ultimate good which she was convinced lay at the end of
everything, and meanwhile, being young and merry, she found his
zebra-skin trousers very ridiculous.
Just as Rachel and her mother finished their conversation about Mr.
Ishmael, Mr. Dove arrived from a little Kloof, where he had been
engaged with the Kaffirs in cutting bushes to make a thorn fence round
their camp as a protection against lions and hyenas. He looked older
than when we last met him, and save for a fringe of white hair, which
increased his monkish appearance, was quite bald. His face, too, was
even thinner and more eager, and his grey eyes were more far-away than
formerly; also he had grown a long white beard.
“Where did that buck come from?” he asked, looking at the dead
creature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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