Just then we reached the house which had a pretty patch of well-kept flower-garden in front of it, surrounded by a fence covered with wire netting to keep out buck.  By the gate squatted our three retainers, looking very blown and rather ashamed of themselves.

“Your master wishes to thank you for your help in a dark hour, Footsack, and I wish to congratulate you all upon the swiftness of your feet,” I said in Dutch.

“Oh!  Baas, the Basutos were many and their spears are sharp,” he began apologetically.

“Be silent, you running dog,” I said, “and go help your master to dismount.”

Then we went through the gate, Anscombe leaning on my shoulder and on that of Mr. Marnham, and up the path which was bordered with fences of the monthly rose, towards the house.  Really this was almost as charming to look at near at hand as it had been from far away.  Of course the whole thing was crude in detail.  Rough, half-shaped blocks of marble from the neighbouring quarry had been built into walls and columns.  Nothing was finished, and considered bit by bit all was coarse and ugly.  Yet the general effect was beautiful because it was an effect of design, the picture of an artist who did not fully understand the technicalities of painting, the work of a great writer who had as yet no proper skill in words.  Never did I see a small building that struck me more.  But then what experience have I of buildings, and, as Anscombe reminded me afterwards, it was but a copy of something designed when the world was young, or rather when civilization was young, and man new risen from the infinite ages of savagery, saw beauty in his dreams and tried to symbolize it in shapes of stone.

We came to the broad stoep, to which several rough blocks of marble served as steps.  On it in a long chair made of native wood and seated with hide rimpis, sat or rather lolled a man in a dressing-gown who was reading a book.  He raised himself as we came and the light of the sun, for the verandah faced to the east, shone full upon his face, so that I saw him well.  It was that of a man of something under forty years of age, dark, powerful, and weary—­not a good face, I thought.  Indeed, it gave me the impression of one who had allowed the evil which exists in the nature of all of us to become his master, or had even encouraged it to do so.

In the Psalms and elsewhere we are always reading of the righteous and the unrighteous until those terms grow wearisome.  It is only of late years that I have discovered, or think that I have discovered, what they mean.  Our lives cannot be judged by our deeds; they must be judged by our desires or rather by our moral attitude.  It is not what we do so much as what we try to do that counts in the formation of character.  All fall short, all fail, but in the end those who seek to climb out of the pit, those who strive, however vainly, to fashion failure to success, are, by comparison, the righteous, while those who are content to wallow in our native mire and to glut themselves with the daily bread of vice, are the unrighteous.  To turn our backs thereon wilfully and without cause, is the real unforgiveable sin against the Spirit.  At least that is the best definition of the problem at which I in my simplicity can arrive.