“Oh! You great man!” she said distinctly, but in a voice that was hardly above a whisper.
Those words, and still more her tone, stunned him as if somebody had fired a gun close to his ear. He stared back at her stupidly.
“Oh! you great man!” she repeated slowly, glancing right and left as if meditating a sudden escape. “And you think that I am going to starve with you. You are nobody now. You think my mamma and Leonard would let me go away? And with you! With you,” she repeated scornfully, raising her voice, which woke up the child and caused it to whimper feebly.
“Joanna!” exclaimed Willems.
“Do not speak to me. I have heard what I have waited for all these years. You are less than dirt, you that have wiped your feet on me. I have waited for this. I am not afraid now. I do not want you; do not come near me. Ah-h!” she screamed shrilly, as he held out his hand in an entreating gesture—”Ah! Keep off me! Keep off me! Keep off!”
She backed away, looking at him with eyes both angry and frightened. Willems stared motionless, in dumb amazement at the mystery of anger and revolt in the head of his wife. Why? What had he ever done to her? This was the day of injustice indeed. First Hudig—and now his wife. He felt a terror at this hate that had lived stealthily so near him for years. He tried to speak, but she shrieked again, and it was like a needle through his heart. Again he raised his hand.
“Help!” called Mrs. Willems, in a piercing voice. “Help!”
“Be quiet! You fool!” shouted Willems, trying to drown the noise of his wife and child in his own angry accents and rattling violently the little zinc table in his exasperation.
From under the house, where there were bathrooms and a tool closet, appeared Leonard, a rusty iron bar in his hand. He called threateningly from the bottom of the stairs.
“Do not hurt her, Mr. Willems. You are a savage. Not at all like we, whites.”
“You too!” said the bewildered Willems. “I haven’t touched her. Is this a madhouse?” He moved towards the stairs, and Leonard dropped the bar with a clang and made for the gate of the compound. Willems turned back to his wife.
“So you expected this,” he said. “It is a conspiracy. Who’s that sobbing and groaning in the room? Some more of your precious family. Hey?”
She was more calm now, and putting hastily the crying child in the big chair walked towards him with sudden fearlessness.
“My mother,” she said, “my mother who came to defend me from you—man from nowhere; a vagabond!”
“You did not call me a vagabond when you hung round my neck—before we were married,” said Willems, contemptuously.
“You took good care that I should not hang round your neck after we were,” she answered, clenching her hands, and putting her face close to his. “You boasted while I suffered and said nothing. What has become of your greatness; of our greatness—you were always speaking about? Now I am going to live on the charity of your master. Yes. That is true. He sent Leonard to tell me so.
And you will go and boast somewhere else, and starve. So! Ah! I can breathe now! This house is mine.”
“Enough!” said Willems, slowly, with an arresting gesture.
She leaped back, the fright again in her eyes, snatched up the child, pressed it to her breast, and, falling into a chair, drummed insanely with her heels on the resounding floor of the verandah.
“I shall go,” said Willems, steadily. “I thank you. For the first time in your life you make me happy. You were a stone round my neck; you understand. I did not mean to tell you that as long as you lived, but you made me—now. Before I pass this gate you shall be gone from my mind. You made it very easy. I thank you.”
He turned and went down the steps without giving her a glance, while she sat upright and quiet, with wide-open eyes, the child crying querulously in her arms. At the gate he came suddenly upon Leonard, who had been dodging about there and failed to get out of the way in time.