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Almighty! it turns my blood cold to look at it and to think that Christian men, ay, and women and children too, may be pounding to pulp in those breakers." "Without doubt the death is as good as another," I answered; "not that I would choose it, for I wish to die in my bed with the predicant saying prayers over me, and my husband weeping or pretending to at the foot of it." "Choose it!" he said.
At length came the eve of the wedding day and with it the predicant, who arrived hungry and thirsty but running over with smiles and blessings. That night we all supped together and were full of joy, nor were Ralph and Suzanne the least joyous of us, though they said little, but sat gazing at each other across the table as though the moon had struck them.
"I thought she would not last another day." Now for the first time the man at the head of the grave turned. Lifting his hand, he pointed to me, whereon the other two men turned also. "God above us!" he said in a choked voice, "at last I am quite mad. Look! there stands the spook of young Allan, the son of the English prédicant who lived near Cradock."
Moreover, the prédicant Celliers is away, so there is none to marry them." "You speak strange words, Mynheer Marais," said Retief quietly, "especially when I remember all that this 'cursed Englishman' has done for you and yours, for I have heard every bit of that story, though not from him. Now hearken. You have appealed to the law, and, as commandant, I must allow your appeal.
She has got the husband for whom she has been craving, and the first thing she does is to snivel. Well, if I had done that to my husband I should have expected him to box my ears, though Heaven knows that I should have had excuse for it." Here the predicant woke up, seeing his chance.
I cried, "when all is settled and the predicant has ridden for two days to do the thing, is the marriage to be put off because forsooth this little black idiot declares that she sees things on bits of glass in a bowl, and because you, Jan, who ought to know better, take the lie from her lips and make it your own? I say that I am mistress here and that I will not allow it.
"Ah, Marie," said her father, speaking in Dutch, "so you have found him at last," and he nodded towards me, adding: "You should be flattered, little man. Look you, this missie has been sitting for two hours in the sun waiting for you, although I told her you would not arrive much before ten o'clock, as your father the prédicant said you would breakfast before you started.
At any rate, it is certain that I will not go away and leave her here to starve." Now I think that something which he saw in my eye showed him that I was in earnest. At least, he changed his tone and began to argue, almost to plead. "Be reasonable, Allan," he said. "How can you marry Marie when there is no prédicant to marry you?
At the least, he was not at all angry, although he said that I must not mention the business to the predicant, who was well known to be a prejudiced man. Then he asked Sihamba to show him the wonders of the bowl.
The man waved a sheaf of printed handbills in his hand and cried: "A quarter of a peso is all you have to pay for this prayer to Christ Our Lord upon the Cross. A quarter ..." Then he would duck for a moment, to reappear with a snake's tooth, a sea star, or the skeleton of a fish. In the same predicant tone, he lauded the medical virtues and the mystical powers of every article he sold.
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