Aletta Part 22

"Yes. He was already settled down on his own place some time before I came home."

"Was he? Never went off it, I suppose?"

"No"--wonderingly. "He has been there since he came back from Rhodesia, he and Frank Wenlock together. At least, he was looking out for a farm at first, while he was staying with the Wenlocks. Then he got one and hasn't been off it since."

"Not?"

"No--except to go into Schalkburg now and then, or to come and see us."

"Oh yes. To come and see you?" rejoined Piet, jocosely. "Hasn't been up here at all of late, eh?"

"He has been up here before, but not lately, not within the last year.

I think longer, because he served through the Matabele rising. But he was up in Rhodesia some little while after that."

"Was he? Oh yes," said the diplomatic Piet, in a tone as though by now only politely interested in the subject. But the while he was, to all outward appearances, turning the photograph round and round listlessly, but in reality scrutinising it keenly, now obliquely from the top corner, now sideways. "How long did you say you had been engaged, Aletta?"

"Just over two months," answered the girl, her eyes brightening.

"_Ach_! he isn't listening to you at all, Aletta," struck in the partner of Piet's joys and sorrows, looking up from her book. "He has forgotten all about Mr Kershaw by this time, and is thinking over the last political move. What did you say his name was--Mr Kershaw's, I mean?"

"Colvin. It's a family surname turned into a Christian name. Oh, and such a joke, Anna! You should have heard Tant' Plessis on that very thing," And she proceeded to narrate how that perverse old relative had insisted on saddling upon her _fiance_ a historic Protestant Reformer of the sixteenth-century for grandfather. Piet fairly shouted with mirth.

"Old Tant' Katrina! _Ja_, she was a _kwaai vrouw_!" he cried. "I have good reason to remember her. When we were young ones, at Rondavel, the other side Heilbron, she would come and stop there for any time. She was always saying we didn't get enough _strop_ and worrying the _Ou'

Baas_ to give us more. He only laughed at her--and one day she wanted to give us some herself. But we wouldn't take it. We s.n.a.t.c.hed the _strop_ from her and ran away. But we had to spend a week dodging her.

She had got a broomstick then. She s.h.i.+ed it at us one day, and hit my brother Sarel--the one that is in Bremersdorp now--over the leg. He couldn't walk straight for about six months after. Then she and the _Ou' Baas_ had words, and she cleared out _Ja_, she _was_ a _kwaai vrouw_. And now she is with Stepha.n.u.s! Well, well. But Aletta, what did she say to your being engaged to an Englishman?"

"Oh, she consoled herself that his grandfather was the great Calvinus,"

answered Aletta, breaking into a peal of laughter over the recollection.

"Mynheer had said so: that was enough for her."

A few days after this Colvin arrived in person, and then it seemed to Aletta that she had nothing left to wish for. But he would not allow her to give him all her time exclusively. She had certain social calls upon it, and, in justice to her entertainers, these must not be set aside. Piet Plessis had been the first to notice this, and was capable of appreciating it, for he himself was astonished at the brightening effect the presence of Aletta had shed within his home.

"Did I not tell you," she would cry triumphantly, "that this Englishman was not like other Englishmen?"

And Piet would laughingly agree.

Colvin himself did not fail to note the pride and delight wherewith she would "produce" him--as he put it--to every fresh batch of people whose acquaintance he made. Once or twice he took her to task for it.

"You know, darling," he would say, with a lurking amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes, "it is not 'up to date' to show feeling. You ought, for instance, to appear just languidly tolerant of my presence at all--rather as if I were of no account in the world's scheme except to fetch and carry."

"Oh, ought I?" she would answer. "Well, when I see you want me to, I will try and begin."

Those were happy days--for these two at any rate. For those outside the enchanted portal they were days of dark anxiety; yet on the surface little of this appeared. People came and went as usual. To judge from the ordinary manner of Piet Plessis, no one would have suspected the mind of that inscrutable official to be working and scheming to its utmost capacity. He was a good deal away from home, returning late, or not at all, and then with a cheerful breezy apology for the calls upon his time entailed by a confoundedly serious political outlook. But he had at once made Colvin free of the house, and the latter was grateful for the quiet uninterrupted retreat thus afforded from the turmoil of excitement and wild talk outside; and not the least happy hours were those he spent in the cool, bosky garden, while Aletta sat at her work, and talked to him, and they grew to know each other more and more, and every day served but to deepen their mutual understanding, and love, and appreciation. So the days wore on, and then from the bright, halcyon blue, now const.i.tuting the lives of the twain, the bolt fell, and the name thereof was written in but three letters--lurid letters traced in blood--

War!

Yes, the storm had burst at last. The preliminary clouding over, the flashes and mutterings, distant but drawing nearer, had culminated in a great and terrible outburst, in the thunder roar of cannon along nearly a thousand miles of border. The historical "ultimatum" had been delivered. The land which but few years ago, comparatively speaking, had been inhabited, and that hot too thickly, by a population of primitive farmers, had thrown down the gauntlet in the face of the valour and wealth and boundless resource of the Empire on which the sun never sets. And the challenge had been met in the only possible way, and once more two Christian and civilised races were shedding each other's blood like water, while countless swarms of dark-skinned and savage heathen stood by and looked on.

CHAPTER THREE.

HIS HONOUR THE PRESIDENT.

"We shall have to turn you into a prisoner of war, Colvin," said Piet Plessis a week or so after the breaking out of hostilities. "And, as I feel sort of responsible for your safe custody, my orders to you as your custodian are to go over to the Grand, now, at once, and pack up your traps and bring them here. I'd have suggested it before, but everything was so _uit-makaar_, and I didn't know whether you might not have been wanting to go down-country again."

Whereby it is manifest that the inquiries we heard Piet promise to set afloat had turned out satisfactory, albeit their burden and the result he had characteristically kept to himself.

"No. I don't feel that way inclined, Piet," answered Colvin. "I am a sort of cosmopolitan rover, without ties--except such as are here," he added significantly. "Besides, it's more interesting watching the row from behind your lines than from behind those of the other side. By the way, we are quite alone, just the two of us. What show do you think your crowd has got?"

"What show?" said the other, after an instinctive glance on either side.

"Look here, Colvin. You're one of us now. If anybody who wasn't had asked me that question I should have said: 'It is all in the hands of Providence, and our cause is just.' Now I say: 'It is all within the potentialities of politics, and the potentialities of politics spell Uncertainty.' What show? Every show. We shall see. But if you really are wanting to go down-country any time later, I dare say I could always get you through the lines."

"Oh, we'll think of that later. I might feel inclined to go and see some of the fighting--"

"What's that? What might you feel inclined to do?" interrupted the voice of Aletta, who with Mrs Plessis had just come out on the back _stoep_, where the above conversation was taking place. "Colvin, I am astonished at you! See some of the fighting indeed! Do you think I shall let you?"

She had locked her hands together round his arm, just resting her head against his shoulder, and stood facing the other two, with the prettiest air of possession. Piet Plessis spluttered:

"Ho, ho! Colvin! A sort of cosmopolitan rover without ties; isn't that what you were saying just now? Without ties? Ho, ho, ho!" And the jolly Dutchman shouted himself into a big fit of coughing.

"He is one of us now, is he not, Piet?" went on the girl, a tender pride s.h.i.+ning from her eyes. "Yet he talks about going to fight against us.

Yes, you were saying that, Colvin. I heard you when we came out."

"Little termagant!" he rejoined lovingly, drawing one of the hands which was linked round his arm into his. "I wasn't talking about fighting against anybody. I said I might go and _see_ some of the fighting. You may go and see a bull-fight, you know, but you needn't necessarily be taking part in it. In fact, the performers on both sides would object, and that in the most practical manner, to your doing so. Now, I meant to go as a non-combatant. Sort of war-correspondent business."

"Well, we are not going to let you do anything of the sort," answered Aletta decisively. "Are we, Piet? Why don't you make a prisoner of war of him, then he can't do as he pleases?"

"'He is one of us now,'" quoted Colvin, innocently. "I believe those were the words. How can 'one of us' be a prisoner of war?"

Piet laughed at this deft turning of the tables.

"Go away and get your traps, man," he said, "then you'll be all snug and fixed up here by lunch-time. Here's the buggy," as the sound of wheels came through from the front of the house. "I must get back to office.

So long?"

Every day some fresh news from the seat of war came flowing in-- beginning with the capture of the armoured train at Kraaipan, historical as the first overt act of hostility, the investment of Kimberley and Mafeking, the reverse at Elandslaagte, and the death of the British general, and, later on, the arrival of a good many British prisoners.

And over and above authenticated news, of course wild rumour was busy, magnifying this or that skirmish into a Boer victory, diminis.h.i.+ng losses, and playing general skittles with most of the facts of the particular event reported, as is invariably the case on either side of the contested field. But what struck Colvin Kershaw after the first week of excitement was the calm, matter-of-fact way in which it was received by the crowd at large. News which would have thrown Cape Town or Durban into a perfect delirium, was treated in Pretoria as so much matter of course, and only to be expected.

Day after day, he would watch the muster of burghers or the entraining of the guns, great and small, of the Staats Artillerie, and here again the sober, almost phlegmatic demeanour of the combatants was remarkable.

Rough, weather-beaten, somewhat melancholy-looking men were these mounted burghers--many of them large and powerful of stature. They bestrode wiry, undersized nags--which bore besides their riders the frugal ration of biltong and biscuit, with which the Boer can get along for days. Slung round with well-filled bandolier, rifle on thigh, and mostly wearing weather-worn broad-brimmed hats--though some of the older ones were crowned with the white chimney-pot--they would muster in front of the Dutch Reformed church, and pace forth, singing perhaps a Dutch hymn or a s.n.a.t.c.h of the "Volkslied"--most of them smoking their pipes, tranquil, phlegmatic, as though they were all going home again. The hooraying and handshaking and handkerchief-waving and flag-wagging which would have accompanied a British combatant force under like circ.u.mstances, would be conspicuous by its absence.

While watching such a muster, a man, who was standing among the spectators, turned at her voice and, lifting his hat, shook hands with Aletta. He was a tall gentlemanly-looking man, with a fair beard and moustache worn after the Vand.y.k.e cut, and was a Hollander with a Portuguese name. He, too, had been a high Government official.

"I haven't seen you for a long time, Dr Da Costa," said Aletta. "I thought you had gone to the front."