Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/188

 just to require its repayment from one who had saved infinitely greater interests.

“And yet I was content with such repayment. For by not exacting it the door would have been opened wide to dishonesty.

“After waiting for days—you will understand in what state of mind!—I received from the Governor’s secretariate a letter in which he notified me that I was suspected of disloyalty, and should have to answer a number of charges with regard to my administration. Some of them I could at once clear up. For others, however, I required to examine certain documents, and it was of special importance that I should look into these matters at Natal itself, in order to inquire among my clerks into the causes of the discrepancies found, as probably there I should have succeeded in my efforts to clear up everything. For instance, the neglect to write off moneys sent to Mandhéling—you know, Verbrugge, that troops in the interior are paid from the Natal treasury supplies—or other similar things, which most probably would at once have been discovered by me if I could have looked into them on the spot, might very likely have caused these regrettable errors. But the General would not let me go to Natal. This refusal made me all the more impressed with the strange manner in which this charge of disloyalty had been laid against me. Why had I been so suddenly transferred from Natal, and that under suspicion of disloyalty? Why had this degrading suspicion only been made known to me when I was far from the place where I should have been in a position to defend myself? And above all, why had these matters in my case immediately been placed in the most unfavourable light, contrary to justice and accepted custom?

“Before I was even able to reply to all the strictures as best I could without archives or oral inquiry, I learnt from an indirect source that the General was so angry with me ‘because at Natal I had crossed him, in which indeed, people added, I had been very wrong.’

“Then a light dawned on me. Yes, I had crossed him, but all