Page:The Little Karoo (1925).djvu/22

The Little Karoo his gentleness of heart. For his wife Deltje his tenderness had increased with age, and, lately, with her pain. The little old woman, plump and round, with skin as soft and smooth as a child’s, and a quiet, never-failing cheerfulness of spirit in spite of her pain, was dearer to him now than she had been as his bride. As his bride she had come to him up in the mountains from the harsh service of Mevrouw du Toit of Leeuw Kraal with but the clothes she wore and her Bible tied up in a red-and-white handkerchief. Mevrouw’s eyes had been weak, and to save her mistress’s eyes Deltje as a young girl had been taught to read. Juriaan could neither read nor write, and when on their marriage night Deltje had opened her Bible and read to him it had seemed to him that no music in all the world could be so beautiful as this. In old age her voice had become thin as a bird’s, but her reading was still beautiful to him. Their years of poverty, which might have embittered them, their childlessness, [18]