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Updated: June 26, 2025
The sky was all red in the west; there were long, long shadows across the snowy fields, and the corners of the kitchen were quite dark. "It's almost time to expect him, now," said Vrouw Vedder; and she brought out a sheet and spread it in the middle of the kitchen floor. She stirred up the fire, and the room was filled with the pleasant glow from the flames.
Ben was half inclined to think that these personages were automata like the moving figures in the garden at Broek; for they both nodded their heads slowly, in precisely the same way, and both went on with their employment as steadily and stiffly as though they worked by machinery. The old man puffed, puffed, and his vrouw clicked her knitting needles, as if regulated by internal cog wheels.
Grandfather gave the fish he caught to Kit and Kat, and Vrouw Vedder cooked it for their supper; and though it was not a very big fish, they all had some. Grandfather must have told Vrouw Vedder something about what had happened; for that night, when she put Kit to bed, she felt of his clothes carefully but she didn't say a word about their being damp.
There was a little hook on the end of each line. Vrouw Vedder kissed Kit and Kat good-bye. "Mind grandfather, and don't fall into the water," she said. Grandfather and the twins started off together down the long road beside the canal. The house where the twins lived was right beside the canal.
"Quick, Kit, quick!" said Vrouw Vedder. "Don't let them go into the canal! We must drive them home." Kit ran boldly forward in front of them, and Kat ran too. She spilled some of the milk; but she was in such a hurry that she never knew it, until afterwards, when she found some in her wooden shoes!
Soon he was comfortably settled under the new cover, declaring, as his vrouw tucked him in snug and warm, that it was the last daylight that should see him abed. "Aye! I can hope it myself," laughed Dame Brinker, "now you have been frisking about at that rate."
Only when it was finished the Heer Meyer, whose natural gloom had been deepened by all these events, said: "Allemachte! but you have luck, Allan, to be left when everyone else is taken. Now, did I not know you so well, like Hernan Pereira I should think that you and that devil Dingaan had winked at each other." The Vrouw Prinsloo turned on him furiously.
Sometimes, when their load was delivered, the dealer would jump in the cart and have a fine drive to his home beyond the gates of the city; and sometimes, I regret to say, a patient vrouw would trudge beside the cart with a fish basket upon her head and a child in her arms while her lord enjoyed his drive, carrying no heavier burden than a stumpy clay pipe, the smoke of which mounted lovingly into her face.
'Oh, replied the Boer, 'because the vrouw said I hadn't to. The Boer seldom does anything without first consulting his wife, and it is hinted that the wives made a very bad job of the rinderpest. The vrouw steers the ship. It is so when the whole family goes to town to make the half-yearly purchases.
She was a bulky Dutch vrouw, with a dishevelled head of coarse black hair, and a dirty cotton gown, and dirty bare feet in bulgy shoes that were trodden down at heel. But with her livid, purple face and protruding, bloodshot eyeballs uplifted to the drifting cloud of greenish lyddite vapour that thinned away overhead, she was great and terrible, and the very incarnation of Maternity Bereft.
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