Aletta: A Tale of the Boer Invasion

Boers, as a rule, seldom care for bird-shooting, looking upon it as sport for children and Englishmen. Birds in their opinion are hardly worth eating, guinea-fowl excepted. When these are required for table purposes they obtain them by the simple process of creeping stealthily up to their roost on a moonlight night, and raking the dark mass of sleeping birds – visible against the sky on the bare or scanty-leaved boughs – with a couple of charges of heavy shot Stephanus laughed good-humouredly, and said they would find buck directly. Then they would see who had the better weapon.

They had got into another enclosure, where the ground was more open. Colvin had already bagged another koorhaan and a brace of partridges, and so far was not ill-satisfied. Suddenly Cornelis was seen to dismount. A buck was running across the open some three hundred yards away. Bang! A great splash of dust nearly hid the animal for a moment. A near thing, but yet not quite near enough. On it went, going like the wind, now behind a clump of bushes now out again. Cornelis had another cartridge in, and was kneeling down. A wire fence stretched across the line of the fleeing animal, which would have to slacken speed in order to get through this. Watching his moment, Cornelis let go. The “klop” made by the bullet as it rushed through the poor little beast – through ribs and heart – was audible to them there at upwards of four hundred yards. It never moved afterwards.

“Oh, fine shot!” cried Colvin, with a grim afterthought to himself, viewing it by the light of the failure of the Bloemfontein Conference.

“It’s a duiker ram, Pa,” sang out the young Dutchman. Then he shouted to the Kafirs to bring it along, and the three moved onward. Soon Colvin got his chance. A blekbok, started by the tread of Stephanus’ horse, raced right across him at about forty-five yards, broadside on. Up went the gun, a second’s aim, and the pretty little animal turned a most beautiful somersault, and lay kicking convulsively, struck well forward in the head.

“Well done, well done! Maagtig kerel! but you can do something with shot!” cried Stephanus, approvingly.

Presently the metallic grating cackle of guinea-fowl was borne to their ears. They were near the banks of the Sneeuw River, where the mimosa cover and prickly pear klompjes were a favourite haunt of those splendid game birds. By dint of manoeuvring Colvin got right in among them, their attention being diverted by the other horseman. Up rose quite a number. Bang, bang! right and left, down they came. More rise. Bang, bang! One miss, one more bird down. Then they get up, more and more of them, by twos and threes, and by the time there are no more of them, and Colvin has picked up eight birds and is beginning to search for three more that have run, he is conscious that life can hold no improvement on the sheer ecstasy of that moment.

And then, when they return to the homestead in the roseate afterglow of the pearly evening – and the spoils are spread out:

“Five bucks, and eighteen birds,” cries Stephanus, counting the bag. “Not so bad for a mixed shoot – and only one bird gun among us. Aletta, this is an Englishman who can shoot.”

Colvin is conscious of enjoying this small triumph, as the girl’s bright face is turned towards him approvingly, and she utters a laughing, half-bantering congratulation.

“Where is Adrian?” he says, looking around.

“Adrian? Oh, he went long ago – soon after you did.”

Keenly watching her face, while not appearing to, he does not fail to notice the tinge of colour which comes into it as she answers. So Adrian has been trying his luck then; but, has he succeeded? How shall he find out? But why should he find out? What on earth can it matter to him?

Yet throughout the evening the one question he is continually asking himself, and trying to deduce an answer to, is —

Has he succeeded?

Chapter Twelve.

“The Only English Girl.”

May Wenlock was in a temper.

She had got up in one, and throughout the morning her mother and brother had had the full benefit of it. Why she was in it she could not have told, at least with any degree of definitiveness. She was sick of home, she declared; sick of the farm, sick of the very sight of everything to do with it; sick of the eternal veldt. The mountains in the background were depressing, the wide-spreading Karroo plains more depressing still, although, since the rain, they had taken on a beautiful carpeting of flower-spangled green. She wanted to go away – to Port Elizabeth, or Johannesburg; in both of which towns she had relatives; anywhere, it didn’t matter – anywhere for a change. Life was too deadly monotonous for anything.

Well, life on a farm in the far Karroo is not precisely a state of existence bristling with excitement, especially for the ornamental sex, debarred both by conventionality and inclination from the pleasures of the chase. But May was not really so hardly used as she chose to imagine. She was frequently away from home visiting, but of late, during almost the last year, she had not cared to go – had even refused invitations – wherein her brother saw another exemplification of feminine unreasonableness and caprice. Her mother, a woman and more worldly wise, was not so sure on that head.

“What’s the row, anyhow?” said Frank, bluntly. “What do you want to scoot away for, and leave mother and me to entertain each other? Girls are always so beastly selfish.”

“Girls selfish? Men, you mean,” she flashed back. “Men are the most selfish creatures in existence. I hate them – hate them all.”

“Why, only the other day you were saying that you had come round to the idea that it was much jollier in the country, and that you hated towns,” went on Frank. “You’ve said it over and over again, and now – ”

“Oh, go away, Frank, can’t you, and leave her alone,” said his mother. “Why do you take such a delight in teasing her when you see she’s out of sorts?”

“Out of sorts, eh? That’s what women always say when they’re in a beastly bad temper. Oh, well, thank goodness I’ve no time for that sort of thing.” And cramming his pipe he went out.

Frank was right, if somewhat inconsiderate. May was in a bad temper – a very bad temper indeed. Hardly had he gone than she flung on her white kapje, the same we first saw her in, and which became her so well, and went out too, but not after him. She went round among her fowl-houses, then strolled along the quince hedges to see if any of the hens had been laying out and in irregular places for the benefit of the egg-loving muishond, or similar vermin, but her mind some how was not in it. She gazed out over the surrounding veldt. A little cloud of dust away in the distance caused her to start and her eyes to dilate. But it passed away and was gone. It heralded the approach of nobody. The distant flying cackle of a cock koorhaan alarmed had the same effect, but no sign of life, far or near, save the slow movement of black ostriches grazing, and the occasional triple boom as they lifted up their voices. The sun, flaming down in the cloudless forenoon, caused the great expanse of plains to shimmer and glow with mirage-like effect, giving to each distant table-topped mountain an appearance of being suspended in mid-air.

Her eyes filled as she stood thus gazing, and two shining tears rolled down.

“Oh, I must get away from here,” she said to herself. “All this is weighing upon my nerves. I hate men – selfish, cruel, heartless wretches!”

She caught her voice, and was conscious that the pulsations of her heart had undergone an acceleration. Away in the distance a large dust-cloud was advancing, and with it the white tilt of a Cape cart.

“Only some tiresome Dutch people,” she said to herself, with a weary sigh. “I hope to goodness they won’t come here, that’s all.”

But her wish was doomed to non-fulfilment, for very soon the cart was seen to turn off the road that should have taken it by and to strike the branch track leading direct to the house. A flutter of feminine garments within it betokened the nature of the visit.

“May, where are you? May?” shouted Frank, in stentorian tones. “Oh, there you are. Here’s a whole crowd coming down into the drift. Looks like the De la Reys. They’ll be here in a minute.”

“I wish they’d be somewhere else in a minute, then,” muttered May to herself with a frown that quite transformed the pretty, winning face within the ample white kapje.

Frank’s surmise proved correct. The occupants of the cart were the three De la Rey girls and their brother Jan. As they drove up Mrs Wenlock came out in a flutter of excitement and welcome.

“How good of you to come over!” she said. “I am so glad to see you. We don’t get many visitors just now. Why, Aletta, I should hardly have known you. My, but you must have been away quite a long time. I suppose you have been having grand times down at the Cape. And how tall you have grown! Well, I always say it does a girl good to send her about among folks and to see a little of the world. Let’s see, I don’t think you and my May have ever met. She was not with us when we first came up.”

May, who had already been exchanging greetings with the other girls, now turned to this one.

“No, we haven’t,” she said. “How do you do, Miss De la Rey?” And as the two clasped hands each was mentally reading the other.

“What a figure!” thought May to herself. “How easily and with what unconscious grace she moves! I wish I had it instead of being fat and dumpy” – which she wasn’t – “and beautifully dressed, yet quite plainly. Well, she isn’t pretty, that’s one thing. Oh no, she isn’t in the least pretty.”

“So this is ‘the only English girl,’” Aletta was thinking. “She is pretty. Yes, mother was right, she is very, very pretty. Those blue eyes – like Table Bay when the sun shines on it at noon – I wish I had them. And the gold of her hair, and her beautiful colouring. I do believe old Tant’ Plessis must be right. Frank, too, has improved since I saw him. He has grown quite good-looking.”

The said Frank, having shouted ineffectually for one of the boys, presumably away on some other business, was helping Jan to outspan.

“Well, Jan,” said Mrs Wenlock as they all went inside, “you have been a long time bringing your sister over to see us.”

“Andrina and I have only just got back ourselves, Mrs Wenlock,” struck in Condaas. “Aletta has had a lot to do at home. And we have had old Tant’ Plessis there and ever so many people.”

“Ever so many people. Yes, I think you have had some people you would have been better without, if report speaks true,” replied Mrs Wenlock, shaking a finger at the speaker with a good-humoured laugh. “There are those who come a long way to breed sedition and discontent and differences among folks who are quite happy and contented. We quite thought you had deserted us nowadays because we were English.”

Mrs Wenlock, you see, was one of those good souls who pride themselves on speaking their minds – in this case an utterly tactless operation. A momentary frost lay upon the whole party. But the situation was relieved by the readiness of Aletta.

“Why, Mrs Wenlock, you are forgetting that there is some English blood in us,” she said.

“To be sure I was, child. And your father, although there is no English in him, he is a man for whom I have the greatest regard. He is the last man to listen to agitators and sedition-mongers – of that I am quite sure. How is he, by the way, and your mother?” They reassured her as to the perfect state of health and well-being enjoyed by both parents, which had the effect of leading the conversation away from a very delicate subject. May, the while, had been out of the room to see about getting tea ready, and now returned in time to hear the following: —

“Why don’t you bring your gun over, Frank?” Jan was saying. “Man, there is a fine lot of guinea-fowl down along the river – if Colvin has left any, that is. Maagtig, but he is fond of shooting birds. One klompje down on the draai by the white rock had nearly sixty birds in it, and now there are nine. Colvin has shot all the rest. Guinea-fowl are not easy to get at, you know. There are other klompjes, but he will do the same with them, so you had better be quick or there will be none left.”

“He must have been shooting a lot at your place, Jan.”

“He has. Rather. He comes over nearly every other day to have a shoot. Why, we shall soon have hardly anything left if he goes on at that rate. But the season will soon be over now. Not that we care much about season or no season if we want a buck to eat.”

“Tut-tut, Jan! What’s that you’re saying? And your father Field-cornet, too!” struck in Mrs Wenlock.

May, who was presiding at the tea-tray, hearing this apparently harmless dialogue, felt it to be just about all she could do to restrain the ugly frown which threatened to cloud her face. “He comes over nearly every other day,” Jan had said, yet he had not been near them for about three weeks, or close upon it – not, indeed, since that evening he and Frank had returned from Schalkburg together. He had never been away from them so long as that since he had been settled on his own farm, nor anything like it. What did it mean? What was the attraction? The sport? Well, the sport wasn’t bad at Spring Holt. No – a darker thought gripped her mind and heart, making her miserable. The time corresponded, within a day or two, to that of Aletta’s return. Well, what then? Surely she was tormenting herself unnecessarily. Surely she could hold her own against a Dutch girl – an ugly Dutch girl – she added spitefully to herself. But just then, as she was discharging her duties of deputy hostess mechanically while thus thinking, the voice of the “ugly Dutch girl” broke in upon her broodings, with a remark addressed to herself.