'Tween Snow and Fire: A Tale of the Last Kafir War

Chapter Forty Eight.
Envoi

Ring we the curtain down – for our tale is ended and we have no desire to point a moral thereto. Years have gone by, and new homesteads have risen upon the ashes of the old ones; and flocks and herds are once more grazing in security upon those grassy plains, those pleasant plains, so sunny, so peaceful, so smiling.

And how the broken and decimated tribes were settled on new locations, and how the ringleaders and prominent fighting men of those who owned British allegiance were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, and how the Gaika location was parcelled out into farms, and as such leased by the Department of Crown Lands to white settlers; and how in consideration of certain acts of forbearance and humanity exercised during the period of hostilities and resulting in the saving of several European lives, the sentences of imprisonment passed upon Nteya and Ncanduku were remitted – mainly through the exertions of Eustace Milne – and the two sub-chiefs were allowed to rejoin the banished remnant of their tribe in its new location beyond the Kei – are not all these things matters of history?

And how the sad relics of poor Tom Carhayes, his fate now under no sort of doubt, were gathered together beneath the great krantz in the Bashi valley on the morning after his insane and fatal leap, and conveyed to the settlement for burial, and how Eustace Milne, punctilious to a hair in his dealings with his barbarous neighbours, had paid over the stipulated ransom, even to the very last hoof, to the relatives of Hlangani, even though the contingency of that warrior’s demise was in no wise provided for in the original agreement – these things, too, are they not graven in the memories of all concerned?

But if, to some, the war has brought ruin and death and bereavement, it has entailed vastly different results upon two other persons at any rate; and those, needless to say, the two with whom our story has been mainly concerned. For their good fortune has been great – greater, we fear, than they had any right to expect. They are flourishing exceedingly, and now, after years of union, it still seems to them that they have only just begun to enter upon that glowing vista of lifelong happiness, down which they had gazed so wistfully in the old, troubled, and well-nigh hopeless time. But after sorrow and heaviness cometh joy – sometimes. And it has come to these two, by a weird irony of Fate, has come through the agency of a wild and sanguinary drama – through the consistent ferocity of a vindictive barbarian and the logical outcome thereof – even Hlangani’s Revenge.