d. Well, as you grew older you began to understand and
dislike me, and Kenzie began to understand and insult me, and from that
seed of slight and insult grew most that is bad in me. Yes, Suzanne, you
will say that I am wicked; and I am wicked. I have done things of which
I should not like to tell you. I have done such things as you saw last
night; I have mixed myself up with Kaffir wizardries and cruelties; I
have forgotten God and taken another master, and so far from honouring
my own father, why, I struck him down when he was drunk and dared me to
do it, and of that blow they say he died. Well, I owed him nothing less
for begetting me into such a world as this, and teaching me how to find
the devil before my time.

"And now," he went on after a pause, for Suzanne answered nothing,
"standing before you as I do here with your husband's blood upon my
hands, and seeking your love over his grave, you will look at me and
say--'This man is a monster, a madman, one who should be cast from the
earth and stamped deep, deep into hell!' Yes, all these things I am,
and let the weight of them rest upon your head, for you made me them,
Suzanne. I am mad, I know that I am mad, as my father and grandfather
were before me, but my madness is mixed with knowledge, for in me runs
the blood of the old Pondo witch-doctoress, my grandmother, she who knew
many things that are not given to white men. When I saw you and loved
you I became half mad--before that I was sane--and when the Englishman,
Kenzie, struck me with the whip after our fight at the sheep-kraal, ah!
then I went wholly mad, and see how wisely, for you are the first-fruits
of my madness, you and the body that to-night rolls to and fro in the
ocean.

"You do not answer: Well, look you, Suzanne, I have won you by craft and
blood, and by craft and blood I will keep you. Here you are in my power,
here Heaven itself could not save you from me, in Bull-Head's secret
krantz which none knew of but some few natives. Choose, therefore;
forget the sins that I have committed to win you and become my wife
willingly, and no woman shall ever find a better husband, for then the
fire and the tempest will leave my brain and it will grow calm as it was
before I saw you.

"Have you still no answer? Well, I will not hurry you. See, I must
go--do you know what for? To set scouts lest by any chance your father
or other fools should have found my hiding-place, though I think that
they can never find