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When he had left the moon rode high in the heavens; when he returned it was dawn and he had a bloody tunic and the face of a man who had escaped from hell. He threw himself from his horse and found Boyce, sitting on the stoep with his head in his hands. He shook him by the shoulder. Boyce started to his feet. At first he did not recognise Somers.
The burly burgher, in round-crowned flaunderish hat with brim of vast circumference, in portly gaberdine and bulbous multiplicity of breeches, sat on his "stoep" and smoked his pipe in lordly silence; nor did it ever enter his brain that the active, restless Yankee, whom he saw through his half-shut eyes worrying about in dog day heat, ever intent on the main chance, was one day to usurp control over these goodly Dutch domains.
I was seated on the stoep in the afternoon when I saw three white men and some Cape boys, their servants, riding up to the house. "Here come those who would steal my boy from me," I thought to myself, and, like Pharaoh, I hardened my heart. Now in those days my sight was very good, and while the men were yet some way off I studied them all and made up my mind about them.
Between the wooden pillars of the stoep dangled curtains yet other, of chopped, dyed, and threaded bamboo, while whitewashed drain-pipes, packed with earth and set on end, overflowed with Indian cress, flowering now in extravagant, gorgeous hues of red and brown, sulphur and orange.
A stoep, about six feet wide, rises a foot from the pathway, and there is nothing else to be seen from the outside front. These houses look bare and bald, and are as expressionless as a blind baby. To me most houses have an expression of their own.
Well, up they rode to the stoep, the two Englishmen taking off their hats to me, after their foolish fashion, while the interpreter, who called me "Aunt," although I was younger than he was, asked for leave to off-saddle, according to our custom. I nodded my head, and having given the horses to the Cape boys, they came up onto the stoep and shook hands with me as I sat.
Had his luck already begun to turn, he thought? As he mounted the stoep Lilith herself came forth to meet him. It struck him that the omen was a good one. "Why, you are becoming quite a stranger," she said.
With Krool before them, who was of the veld and the karoo, whose natural habitat was but a cross between a krall and the stoep of a dopper's home, these men were instantly transported to the land where their hearts were in spite of all, though the flesh-pots of the West End of London had turned them into by-paths for a while.
"Really?" Sylvia opened her eyes. "That doesn't sound very nice certainly. Haven't you got a verandah even I beg its pardon, a stoep?" "We have nothing at all that makes for comfort," declared Mrs. Merston, with bitter emphasis. "We live like pigs in a sty!" "Good heavens!" said Sylvia. "I shouldn't like that." "No, you wouldn't. It takes a little getting used to.
Then she rose with difficulty, for the dropsy in her limbs made her inactive, and walked with the help of a stick to the stoep, where she sat down, looking across the plain at the solemn range of the Drakensberg and thinking without doubt, of that night of fear when my grandfather had rushed down its steeps upon the great schimmel to save her daughter and his wife from an awful death.
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