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Updated: May 17, 2025
Christina was wetting towels for bandages, and her back was towards him, but she knew instantly, and came swiftly to his side. David leaned forward breathlessly, and little Paul cried out with the grip of his hand. They saw a waver of recognition in Frikkie's eyes, a fond light, and it seemed that his lips moved. Christina laid her ear to them. "And a shod horse!" murmured Frikkie. Nothing more.
At the back of her brain dwelt some idea such as this: here was her house, her home, there David, there Frikkie, here she, and where these were together Death could never make the fourth. The same thought sends a stricken child to its mother. David leant on the foot of the bed, his burning eyes on the face of his son, and his brows tortured with anxiety.
Then Frikkie, the huge, the hairy, the heavy-footed, the man who prided himself on his ability to make circumstances, discovered, in a revealing flash, that he was, after all, a poor creature, and that the brightest being on earth was Katje Voss, whose people had settled about thirty miles off next door, as it were.
The arts that made him a man shall keep him a man; so she coaxed the closed eyes and the dumb mouth. But Frikkie would not drink, heard nothing, gave no sign. Christina laid drenched cloths to his forehead, deftly cleansed and bandaged the gaping rent in the base of the skull whence the life whistled forth, and talked to her boy all the while in the low crooning mother voice.
David never moved from the foot of the bed, and never loosed his drawn brows. In came little Paul silently and took his hand, but he never looked down, and the father and the child remained there throughout the languid afternoon. Evening cool was growing up when Frikkie opened his eyes.
In the same barefoot quiet their youth left them, and the constant passing of days marked them, tenderly at first and then more deeply. Their boy, Frikkie, was a man, and thinking of marrying, when the consciousness of the leak in their lives, stood up before them. They were sitting of an evening on the stoep, watching the sun go down and pull his ribbons after him, when Christina spoke.
Frikkie had a voice like a bell, and whiskers like the father of a family, and stood six foot two in his naked feet, and lacked no excellence that a sturdy bachelor should possess.
Christina brought some drink in a cup and held it to the still lips of the young man. "Drink. Frikkie," she pleaded softly. "Drink, my kleintje. Only a drop, Frikkie, and the pain will fly away." She spoke as though he were yet a child, for a mother knows nothing of manhood when her son lies helpless.
"Yes," she said. "What shall I tell Frikkie and the kleintje from you?" "Tell them nothing," he said, after a pause. "It cannot be that I shall be apart from you all long. No; I am very sure of that." She pressed his hand, and soon afterwards felt some pain. It was little, and she made no outcry.
An hour after he was cold, and David was alone on the stoep, questioning pitiless skies and groping for God, while Christina knelt beside the bed within and wept blood from her soul. They buried Frikkie in a little kraal on the hillside, and David made the coffin. When he nailed down the lid he was an old man; when the first red clod rang on it, he felt that life had emptied itself.
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