Hilda had won her heart by unfeigned admiration for the chubby baby. To
a mother, that covers a multitude of eccentricities, such as one expects
to find in incomprehensible English. Mrs. Klaas put up with me because
she liked Hilda.
We spent some months together on Klaas's farm. It was a dreary place,
save for Hilda. The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen
and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir
workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof
of the bald stable for the waggon oxen--all was as crude and ugly as a
new country can make things. It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda
should live in such an unfinished land--Hilda, whom I imagined as moving
by nature through broad English parks, with Elizabethan cottages and
immemorial oaks--Hilda, whose proper atmosphere seemed to be one of
coffee-coloured laces, ivy-clad abbeys, lichen-incrusted walls--all that
is beautiful and gracious in time-honoured civilisations.
Nevertheless, we lived on there in a meaningless sort of way--I hardly
knew why. To me it was a puzzle. When I asked Hilda, she shook her head
with her sibylline air and answered, confidently: "You do not understand
Sebastian as well as I do.
Pages:
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235