Read Ebook: Aletta: A Tale of the Boer Invasion by Mitford Bertram

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Ebook has 1371 lines and 87653 words, and 28 pages

ank Wenlock, though on good enough terms with his Dutch neighbours individually, was one of those not uncommon types who labour under a firm conviction that the Powers above built this planet Earth primarily for the benefit of--and eventually to be solely and absolutely ruled from north to south, and from east to west by--England, and England only.

Personally considered Frank Wenlock was a presentable young fellow enough. Externally of medium height, strong and energetic, his face, lighted up by a pair of blue eyes not unlike those of his sister, though not handsome, was open and pleasing. In character, though somewhat quick-tempered, he was the soul of good-nature, but withal no part of a fool. He and Colvin Kershaw had been fellow-pioneers together in Rhodesia, and had fought side by side throughout the grim struggle 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?"

"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.

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 up-to-date ideas and enterprise of its owner. Beyond these again large patches of cultivated lands, shut in by high quince hedges, sloped down to the Sneeuw River, which took its rise in the Wildschutsberg, and which, normally dry or the merest trickle, could roar down in a terrific torrent at very short notice what time thunderstorms were heavy and frequent in the mountains beyond. Away over the veldt, which, until joining the grassy slopes of the surrounding heights, was gently undulating and fairly covered with mimosa bush, ostriches grazed, or stalked defiantly up and down the wire fencing which divided one large "camp" from another.

If Ratels Hoek was a creditable example of the better class of Dutch farm, no less was its owner an excellent specimen of the better type of Dutch farmer. Stephanus De la Rey was a tall, handsome man of about fifty. He had a fine forehead, blue eyes, and straight, regular features, and the masses of his full brown beard had hardly yet begun to show threads of grey. His character was in keeping with his general appearance, for though quiet-mannered, he was the most straight forward and genial of men, and was immensely looked up to and respected far and wide by such few English as the neighbourhood contained, no less than by his own compatriots.

His wife was a bright, cheerful, brisk-mannered little woman, who, as we have already heard it stated, was half English in that she had owned an English mother. Their family consisted of a liberal eight, of which those now at home represented the younger two of each sex.

Stephanus De la Rey was seated on his stoep, smoking a meditative pipe and thinking deeply. He had just been reading the newspapers, and there was enough in them at that time to give a thoughtful man plenty to think about. His own sympathies were not unnaturally with the Transvaal, where two of his sons had settled, and for its President he entertained a very warm admiration. But he was no fiery patriot. War was a terrible thing, and war between two white nations--two Christian nations, in a land swarming with heathen barbarians--seemed to him hardly justifiable under any circumstances whatever. Even if the worst came to the worst, let the Republic fight its own battles. He and his neighbours had no grievance against the English Government under which they dwelt--save grievances which were purely sentimental and belonging to ancient history; and as he gazed around upon his own prosperous lands the gravity of his thoughts deepened. This was momentarily diverted by the approach of two of his sons--who had just come in from the veldt-- tall, light-haired, quiet-looking youths of two- and three-and-twenty respectively. They seemed to be under the influence of some unwonted excitement.

"We heard some news to-day, Pa," said the elder of the two. "We are to have a visitor to-night. Who do you think it is?"

"I cannot guess. Who is it?"

Both looked furtively at each other and then at their father. The latter did not seem overjoyed at the news. In point of fact he was not. Personally the presence in his house of the Transvaal delegate would have afforded him the keenest gratification but that he knew as surely as though he had been told that the latter's visit would be purely of a political nature, and Stephanus De la Rey preferred to leave politics severely alone. Not only that, but that his own conversion to the ranks of the secret agitators was the motive of the visit he more than suspected.

"Where did you hear that, Jan?" he said.

"Are you not ashamed of yourself, Jan, to stand there before me and talk such wicked nonsense? Is that the sort of Christianity the teaching of Mynheer, as well as of your own parents, has implanted in you, that you can talk about shooting men--Christian men like ourselves, remember--as you would talk of shooting buck? I have nothing to do with Adrian's movements or ideas, although he is my nephew, but I have with yours; so listen to me. There is a great deal of wild talk being flung around just now, but I wish you to have nothing to do with it. Of course you cannot help hearing it from time to time, there is too much of it everywhere unfortunately; but I enjoin you not to take part in it. It is shameful the light way in which such weighty and serious subjects are discussed. When our fathers took up arms to defend their rights and liberties and their lives they did so prayerfully and with the full weight of their solemn responsibilities, and that is why they were victorious. But now such matters are bragged and chattered about by a herd of thoughtless boys. Leave them alone. The times are quite troublous enough, and things may come right or may not, but the only way in which we can help is to be quiet and to attend to our own business."

Stephanus De la Rey turned his head, with a smile.

"I am giving them a little good advice," he said, relighting his pipe. "And I don't think I've ever given them any bad. Have I, boys?"

"No, Pa," they answered, meaning it, too, but not sorry that their mother had come to the rescue: yet profoundly impressed by the stern earnestness of the paternal expostulation.

"Here come people," said Stephanus, gliding easily from the subject, which he had no wish to prolong. "Can you make them out, Cornelis?"

"Is it?"

"Where?"

And the utterers of both queries came forth on to the stoep, causing their brothers to break into a splutter of mirth. The younger of the two girls took after her mother. She was short and dark, and rather too squat for her seventeen years, but had fine eyes. The other, who was a year older, was taller, fair and blue-eyed, and rather pretty.

"Do we? Who's `we,' and who is `all,' I should like to know?" retorted Andrina, with a toss of her golden head.

"I know I don't," said the other girl. "Why, we fight too much for that. But I like fighting him. I wish all Englishmen were like him though. He is so full of fun."

Stephanus welcomed both arrivals with his usual geniality, not allowing the fact that he disapproved of his nephew politically to make the slightest difference in his manner. The young Boer, however, whose self-confidence was lacking in the presence of one to whom he looked up so much, felt somewhat constrained. However, his message had to be delivered, so he jerked out:

"The Patriot will be here at sundown, Oom Stephanus."

"So?"

"Make a `patriot' of me, you mean, Adrian. I am that already in the real meaning of the word. Well, Colvin, what have you been doing lately? It's a long time since I've seen you."

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