Aletta: A Tale of the Boer Invasion. Mitford Bertram
of the Matabele rebellion.
“Now, Mr. Kershaw, can’t you and Frank get together for a moment without fighting about the Boers?” interrupted a brisk, not unpleasing, and yet not altogether refined voice. “But where did you pick up May?”
Colvin turned to greet its owner; a well-preserved, middle-aged woman, not so many years his senior, good-looking too, after a fine, fresh, healthy type.
“Oh, we haven’t begun upon them yet, Mrs. Wenlock,” he replied, ignoring the last query. “We’ll worry that out after dinner.”
“You’re not going on to-night?”
“Yes, I must I want to get to Stephanus De la Rey’s. There’s a joker there I want to meet.”
“Is that the Transvaal emissary?” said Frank, looking up quickly from his plate, for they had sat down to dinner.
“I suppose that’s what you’d call him. But, do you know, all this rather interests me. I like to hear all there is to be said on both sides.”
“Why they’ll hold a meeting and simply spout treason all night,” rejoined Frank vehemently. “Good Lord, if I were Milner, I’d have that fellow arrested and shot as a spy.”
“My dear chap, you can’t shoot ‘spies’ when we are not at war with anybody, and Botma, I suppose, has about as much right to hold a meeting among his countrymen here as a British labour delegate has to organise a strike. These are among the advantages of a free country, don’t you know?”
“Did you come straight here from your place to-day?” said Mrs. Wenlock, by way of covering the angry growl with which her son had received the other’s words.
“No. I slept at Swaart Jan Grobbelaar’s.”
“That’s the old buck who brought away a lot of British skulls from Majuba,” burst in Frank. “They say he sticks one up at a couple of hundred yards every Majuba Day, and practises at it until there isn’t a bit left big enough for a bullet to hit.”
“He must have brought away about a waggonload of them, then, considering that Majuba happened eighteen years ago,” said Colvin. “But I don’t know that it isn’t all a yarn. People will say anything about each other just now.”
“I hear there’s a lot of war-talk among the Dutch in the Wildschutsbergen now, Mr. Kershaw,” said Mrs. Wenlock. “You must hear it, because you’re right in among them all.”
“Oh, they talk a good bit about war, but then what do we do? When I was down at the Port Elizabeth show all the English were busy taking the Transvaal. It was the same thing along Fish River and Koonap. If two or three fellows got together on any given farm they were bound to spend the evening taking the Transvaal. In fact, no Boer could give a shoot on his place without his English neighbours swearing he was rifle-practising for the great upheaval. We talk nothing but the war, but if the Dutchmen do it becomes menace, sedition, and all the rest of it right away.”
Those were the days subsequent to the failure of the Bloemfontein Conference, and racial feeling was near attaining its highest pitch. Frank Wenlock, as we have said, got on with his Dutch neighbours more than passably, which was as well, considering that his English ones were but few and at long distances apart. But even upon him the curse of a far-off dissension had fallen. Colvin Kershaw, on the other hand, was a man of the world, with a well-balanced mind, and somewhat unconventional withal. He took a judicial view of the situation, and, while recognising that it had two sides, and that there was a great deal to be said for both, he distinctly declined to allow any political considerations to make any difference to the relationship in which he stood towards his Boer neighbours and their families, with several of whom he was on very good terms indeed.
A wild effort was made to abandon the burning subject, and for awhile, as they sat upon the stoep smoking their pipes—the conversation ran upon stock and local interests, and the prospects of rain to carry them through the winter. But it soon came round again, as, indeed, in those days it was bound to do, and the hotter and hotter grew Frank Wenlock on the subject, the cooler and cooler remained his opponent. May, for her part, sat and listened. She mostly shared her brother’s prejudices on that particular subject; but here was one whose opinion on most subjects she held in the highest regard. Clearly, then, there was something to be said on the other side.
“Why need you go on to-night, Mr. Kershaw?” struck in Mrs. Wenlock. “Your room is always ready, you know, and it’s quite a long while since you were here.”
“It won’t be so long again, Mrs. Wenlock. But I must be at Stephanus De la Rey’s to-night, because, over and above the delegate, I made an appointment with Piet Lombard over a stock deal.”
“Not to mention other attractions,” cut in May, with a mischievous look in her blue eyes. “Which is the favoured one—Andrina or Condaas?”
“How can one presume upon a choice between two such dreams of loveliness? Both, of course,” was the mirthful rejoinder. But there was no real merriment in the mind of the girl. She had hoped he would stay, had mapped out a potential afternoon’s stroll—it might be, by great good luck, the two of them alone together. And things were so slow, and times so dull, there where they saw no one month in month out, save an occasional Boer passer-by, or a travelling smaus, or feather-buyer, usually of a tolerably low type of Jew—and therefore, socially, no acquisition. Yes, after all, that was it. Times were so dull.
“Don’t be so long finding your way over again,” was the chorus of God-speed which followed the departing guest as his steed ambled away.
He, for his part, seemed to find a good deal to think about as he held on over the wide brown plains, dismounting absently to let himself through a gate every few minutes, for the whole veldt was a network of wire fencing. Ostriches, grazing, lifted their long necks, some in half-frightened, some in half-truculent curiosity, to gaze at him, then dropped them again to resume their picking at the dried sprigs of Karroo bush.
His acquaintance with the Wenlocks dated from just a year back: with the family that is, for he and Frank had, as we have said, campaigned together in Rhodesia. On returning to the Colony at the close of the rebellion he had come to visit his former comrade-in-arms at the latter’s own home, and had spent three months there while looking about for a place of his own. He had soon found one to his liking, and now owned a 5,000-morgen farm in the Wildschutsberg range, where report said he got through more game-shooting than farming. If so, it didn’t seem to matter greatly, for Colvin Kershaw was one of those phenomena occasionally encountered—an habitually lucky man. What he undertook in a small and careless way was wont to turn out better results than ten times the carefully prepared labour and forethought exercised by other people. Furthermore he was uncommunicative as to his own affairs, and whatever was known about him among his neighbours amounted to just nothing at all.
“Come again soon,” had been May’s parting words, and the blue eyes uplifted to his during that last handclasp had been wondrously soft and appealing.
Was it upon this his thoughts were dwelling so intently as he rode along mile after mile? Perhaps. Yet he had often bidden her farewell before.
Chapter Three.
A Boer Farm.
Ratels Hoek, the farm owned by Stephanus De la Rey, was situated in a broad, open basin, surrounded by the craggy, cliff-crowned hills of the Wildschutsberg range.
It was a prosperous-looking place. The homestead was large and roomy, and not unpicturesque, with its deep verandah shaded by growing creepers, which, however, at that time of year were destitute of leafage. A well-kept flower garden, which was a blaze of bright colour in good seasons, went round two sides of the house, and behind, abundant stabling and shearing sheds and kraals and dipping tank testified to the