“Was the boy, Ralph Mackenzie, or Kenzie, shipwrecked in the India in the year 1824?”

“Dear Lord!” I cried, affecting to lose my patience, “am I an old Kaffir wife up before the Landdrost for stealing hens that I should be cross-questioned in this fashion?  Set out all your tale at once, man, and I will answer it.”

Thereon, shrugging his shoulders, the lawyer produced a paper which the interpreter translated to me.  In it were written down the names of the passengers who were upon the vessel India when she sailed from a place called Bombay, and among the names those of Lord and Lady Glenthirsk and of their son, the Honourable Ralph Mackenzie, aged nine.  Then followed the evidence of one or two survivors of the shipwreck, which stated that Lady Glenthirsk and her son were seen to reach the shore in safety in the boat that was launched from the sinking ship.  After this came a paragraph from an English newspaper published in Capetown, dated not two years before, and headed “Strange Tale of the Sea,” which paragraph, with some few errors, told the story of the finding of Ralph—­though how the writing man knew it I know not, unless it was through the tutor with the blue spectacles of whom I have spoken—­and said that he was still living on the farm of Jan Botmar in the Transkei.  This was all that was in the paper.  I asked to look at it and kept it, saying in the morning that the Kaffir girl seeing it lying about the kitchen had used it to light the fire; but to this day it is with the other things in the waggon chest under my bed.

When the paper was done with, the lawyer took up the tale and told me that it was believed in England that Lord Glenthirsk had been drowned in the sea, as indeed he was, and that Lady Glenthirsk and her son perished on the shore with the other women and children, for so those sent by the English Government to search out the facts had reported.  Thus it came about that after a while Lord Glenthirsk’s younger brother was admitted by law to his title and estates, which he enjoyed for some eight years, that is, until his death.  About a year before he died, however, someone sent him the paragraph headed “Strange Tale of the Sea,” and he was much disturbed by it, though to himself he argued that it was nothing but an idle story, such as it seems are often put into newspapers.  The end of the matter was that he took no steps to discover whether the tale were true or false, and none knew of it save himself, and he was not minded to go fishing in that ugly water.  So it came about that he kept silent as the grave, till at length, when the grave yawned at his feet, and when the rank and the lands and the wealth were of no more use to him, he opened his mouth to his son and to his lawyer, the two men who sat before me, and to them only, bidding them seek out the beginning of the tale, and if it were true, to make restitution to his nephew.